Lighting Up the Dark
by Velorien
Summary: AU inspired by an omake in HPMOR. 12 years ago, the Fourth Hokage gave his life to seal Kyubey, the Nine-Brained Demon Fox, into the infant Naruto. Now, the time has come for a smarter, more creative Naruto to take on a world in which quick thinking and a solid grasp of strategy are worth a dozen rare techniques, and a brilliant mind can challenge even the deepest darkness.
1. Prologue

_A/N: This work was inspired by a Naruto-themed omake chapter in "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" by Eliezer Yudkowsky/Less Wrong. If you are unaware of HPMOR, I highly recommend giving it a try irrespective of your knowledge of/attitude towards the Harry Potter books.  
_

-o-

"There you are, Naruto."

Mizuki-sensei, ever the poser, looked down at him from a high tree branch at the other end of the forest clearing.

"I see you've got the scroll. Good work. Now just hand it over to me, and we can talk about your graduation."

Naruto grinned. "Sure. I was just about done with it anyway."

Mizuki suppressed a sneer. The brat had obviously worked hard - the fact that virtually every last inch of the large clearing was littered with shuriken, kunai, scrolls and other training paraphernalia was testament to that - but the odds of that dropout mastering even the simplest forbidden technique were pretty damn low.

"Don't do it, Naruto!" Iruka shouted, bursting in from outside Mizuki's line of sight. Mizuki silently cursed his invariably rotten luck.

"What?!" Naruto exclaimed innocently. "But I've just finished that secret second way of graduating Mizuki-sensei told me about. What am I supposed to do with the scroll now, keep it?"

"Second way of graduating?!" Iruka's eyes, now wide, flickered to Mizuki, then back to Naruto. "Mizuki's been lying to you. There's no such thing. No loyal shinobi would ever ask you to steal from the Hokage. No matter what you do, don't give him the scroll!"

Mizuki started to reach for the enormous Fūma Shuriken strapped to his back. Before he could touch it, however, a fourth figure burst out of the bushes near Iruka.

"Mizuki, you get the scroll! I'll go signal our allies!" the man in a Chūnin jacket shouted before sprinting away.

"Quick, Iruka-sensei, you've got to catch him!" Naruto shouted. "Go! I'll keep the scroll away from Mizuki-sensei!"

But Iruka didn't move. "You're my student, Naruto, and I can't leave you in danger."

"Please just go! I can buy some time here - you know how hard I am to catch! But if he gets backup, they'll beat us both and take it anyway!"

Iruka seemed frozen with indecision.

"Please, Iruka-sensei." Naruto's voice turned serious. "I know how you feel. But if you've ever trusted me as one of your students, then please trust me now."

Iruka said a few words under his breath that were definitely unfit for the ears of young Academy trainees. "Be careful, Naruto." And he ran after the second traitor.

As soon as he was gone, Mizuki turned back to Naruto.

"Well, that was interesting. You just sent him chasing after a clone under the Transformation Technique, didn't you? Are you so arrogant you think you can take me on your own?"

Naruto nodded. "Well, that and I had something to ask you."

"Oh?"

"You're the one who framed me for cheating in the written test, right? You wanted to make sure I couldn't pass the final exam, so you set it up so someone saw 'me' reading the test in the teachers' lounge, and got me disqualified. Why?"

"Oh, so you figured that out." Mizuki shrugged. "Well, I was always going to use one of the failed students to steal the scroll for me. But then I got this brilliant idea for how to screw you over at the same time. And you fell for it like a complete sucker."

"But why me?" Naruto frowned. "I always figured you for one of the few people that didn't automatically hate my guts. What did I ever do to you?"

Mizuki laughed. "Oh, this is rich. I suppose I may as well tell you before you die."

"Tell me what?"

"They've all been lying to you, Naruto. For your entire life. Lying to you about what you are and what you've done."

Mizuki raised his voice dramatically. "You're not human. You're a monster. You're Kyubey, the Nine-Brained Demon Fox that attacked Leaf Village twelve years ago!"

Naruto shrugged. "Yeah, I know."

"What."

"Come on, it doesn't take a genius to figure out. The Nine-Brained Demon Fox attacks the village around my birthday. Then it disappears, and nobody talks or writes about what happened to it. Not "the Fourth Hokage killed it". Not "the Fourth Hokage drove it away". He does something heroic to it, and then it's gone. And then everyone in the village hates me, like _really_ hates me, for as long as I can remember, and they never ever say why."

"Oh, come on." Mizuki seemed torn between disbelief and outrage. "There's no way you could work it out from just that!"

"Well, after I made that connection, I did some digging through the registers in the Civic Library. You'd be amazed how little attention people pay you if you show them a few ryō and tell them an overworked Jōnin paid you to spend the day looking up boring facts for him. Anyway, did you know that there's been exactly one other person in Leaf Village called Uzumaki? And that she died on the Night of Tragedy? And that she was the container for the Nine-Brains at the time?"

Mizuki endeavoured to replace his jaw. "Uh... well, anyway, that's why. No-one's ever going to take the Demon Fox's word over mine, not with the cheating thing, and not if anything went wrong here. It's perfect. That, and you just piss me off."

"Fair enough. Now what?"

"Now... you die!" Mizuki finally grabbed the Fūma Shuriken from his back, and threw it full-strength at Naruto.

Naruto did not dodge. In fact, he sat perfectly still, watching with interest as the enormous blade flew right at his head. Then he vanished as it made contact.

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" Mizuki snapped. "I've been talking to a clone?"

He jumped down to ground level and started walking towards the scroll, taking care not to step on any of the multitude of sharp things littering the clearing. As he came close to the middle, he heard a voice.

"Let's play a game," announced a new clone, appearing close to where the previous one had been.

Mizuki gave him a look of contempt. "Trying to buy time? Don't bother. I'm taking the scroll, and then I'll have all the time in the world to find you and gut you."

Naruto ignored him. "Round One is called _Let's Guess Which Lethal Forbidden Technique Naruto Learned Today._"

Now Mizuki stopped.

"If you win, you get to advance to Round Two. If you lose... you die."

There was a soft popping sound, and then something moved in Mizuki's peripheral vision. He whirled around to see a kunai coming at him fast. He wasn't a Chūnin for nothing, though, and he had one of his own ready to deflect in a fraction of a second.

The kunai touched... and then the attacking blade disappeared in a puff of smoke.

"You almost had me going for a second, you little monster." Mizuki started to turn back, then reflexively moved to try to block a second kunai coming at him from the edge of his vision. The same thing happened again.

"But as a delaying tactic, this is pretty feeble. So some of this stuff on the ground is clones in disguise. So they transform back and throw kunai at me when I'm not looking. What are they going to do, annoy me to death?"

Mizuki didn't even bother blocking the third kunai. Then it drew a sharp line of pain across his cheek.

"What?!"

A fourth kunai exploded into mist upon touching his defence.

A fifth bounced off when he blocked, and only vanished after it hit the ground.

"Shadow clones?! How the hell can _you_ make shadow clones?!"

The Naruto clone sitting by the scroll cheered. "All right! You pass Round One. Now it's time for Round Two, the ever-popular _Find and Destroy All the Shadow Clones Before Iruka-sensei Comes Back and Kicks Your Ass_ round!"

Mizuki spat curses at Naruto, several so exceptionally foul that Naruto made a note to go look them up in a dictionary afterwards.

"If you win, you get to take the scroll and escape. If you lose... you die. Oh, and trying to leave the clearing or take the scroll early counts as a forfeit. If you do that, all the shadow clones will throw their kunai at you at once, from every possible angle. In other words... you die."

Mizuki was starting to get pretty tense. "You're bluffing. So you've got four or five shadow clones hidden in this clearing. They're still clones of a pathetic dropout, and I'm a Chūnin instructor. What do you think they can do to me?"

To Mizuki's increasing discomfort, Naruto started to laugh loudly. "Four or five? Oh, that's good. Oh, man, you really know how to tell 'em, Mizuki-sensei."

"Wh-What's so funny?"

"You said it yourself: I'm the Nine-Brained Demon Fox. And what's the Nine-Brained Demon Fox famous for, apart from its amazing intelligence and devilish good looks?"

Mizuki was starting to sweat. "What?"

"Its incredible chakra control, duh. I can sit here making shadow clones all day long with the amount of chakra you'd need just to scratch your nose."

"Now, let's get back to the game. I've got a bet going with the real Naruto on how many wounds you're going to take before it's over."

The next kunai was from a normal clone. The two after that were solid. Mizuki's movements grew increasingly frantic as blades flew at him from every possible direction, always coming from just outside his line of sight, the frequency gradually increasing, with no pattern to help him tell the shadow kunai from the harmless ones. To make things even worse, every fake kunai he blocked vanished in a puff of smoke right next to his face, briefly obstructing his vision.

_-o-_

Mizuki lay whimpering on the ground, too tired and traumatised to move, and bleeding from dozens of small cuts.

"I see you're out of kunai," the Naruto clone commented cheerfully. "Guess I'd better have the clone Iruka-sensei's been chasing duck out of sight and dispel himself."

There was a pop, and the forbidden technique scroll next to the clone transformed into Naruto.

"Nice job."

"Thanks. I win the bet, though. He lasted way longer than we expected."

"Yeah, yeah. We should clean up - Iruka-sensei's gonna be here any minute."

Naruto snapped his fingers and the entire clearing was temporarily covered in mist. When it faded a second later, all of the "litter" was gone, as was the bet-winning clone. He pulled the real scroll out from behind a random tree some way outside the clearing. As an afterthought, he also dug the Fūma Shuriken out of the ground and threw it down next to Mizuki's semi-comatose form.

"Oh, by the way..." he whispered in Mizuki's ear. "You were right. There were only five shadow clones."

Mizuki groaned.

Iruka-sensei made his appearance a couple of minutes later.

"Naruto! You're safe! Oh, I'm so glad you're safe." He was nearly crying with relief.

Naruto felt a little guilty, but reminded himself that the whole thing had been for Iruka's own protection (aside from the part of it that was about testing out his shiny new technique... and the part that was about getting revenge on a bastard who'd been one smart choice away from murdering some random classmate of Naruto's).

Iruka stared at Mizuki, who was lying in the foetal position muttering "no more... please, no more..."

"What the heck happened, Naruto?!"

"He tried to throw his giant shuriken thing at me, but forgot to let go. After he got over the pain of stabbing himself with all the corners, he had a nervous breakdown over what a pathetic failure of a ninja he was. That made him collapse on top of it, which is how he got all those other injuries." Naruto explained confidently.

"Uh-huh. And what really happened?"

"Aww." Naruto looked sulky. "Fine. I learned the Multiple Shadow Clone Technique from that scroll and made a bunch of clones beat him up. But can you make sure you put that first version in your report?"

Iruka laughed. "You never change, do you, Naruto?"

And the rest of the evening was taken up by an incredulous ANBU receptionist and a whole lot of ramen.


	2. Chapter 1

_A/N: It has come to my attention that some incredibly brave people are reading this without familiarity with the Naruto canon. Fairly warned be ye that this story assumes some basic knowledge of the Narutoverse. Nevertheless, I am happy to include a quick run-down of the Japanese terms used so far. For further information on any unfamiliar terms used in this story, look to the Narutopedia._

_ANBU: ANsatsu senjutsu tokushu BUtai, lit. "assassination (military) tactics special squad". A ninja village's elite special forces, responsible for village security (including interrogation and torture) and particularly high-level missions. They report directly to the village leader, and wear masks with stylised patterns unique to each village to disguise their identities while working._

_Chakra: A term borrowed from Hindu metaphysics. In the Narutoverse, refers to to the combination of vital energy (gained from physical training) and spiritual energy (gained from experience) which serves as life-force for all living things, and also powers ninja supernatural abilities._

_Chūnin: lit. "middle nin(ja)". An advanced rank of ninja. Chūnin are eligible to lead their own squads._

_Fūma Shuriken: lit. "wind demon shuriken". Enormous shuriken a metre or so across, originally developed by the Fūma Clan._ _Some are collapsible for easy carrying._

_Genin: lit. "lower nin(ja)". The lowest rank of ninja._

_Genjutsu: lit. "illusion techniques". Spell-like techniques that alter a target's perception using chakra. More like mind control than ordinary misdirection. Can be dispelled by using a strong enough blast of your own chakra, if you know how._

_Hokage: lit. "fire shadow". The title of the leader of the Hidden Village of Leaf, where the story begins. Each of the five major ninja villages has its own type of Kage - typically, though not always, the strongest ninja in the village.  
_

_Jōnin: lit. "upper nin(ja)". The top rank of ninja. Jōnin are, without exception, extremely powerful. There are also "special Jōnin", who have attained Jōnin-level proficiency in one area but are otherwise Chūnin-level._

_Kunai: lit. "no suffering" (apparently; only just found this out). Ninja throwing knives. In the Narutoverse, also the default ninja melee weapon. Like shuriken, carried in improbably large quantities._

_Kunoichi: lit. "one of nine" (don't ask why). Female ninja._

___Manga: lit. "loose drawings". The Japanese equivalent of comic books.  
_

___Ninja: lit. "hiding person". In medieval Japan, special clans of mercenaries hired for intelligence gathering and assassination. Their extraordinary levels of training and unique equipment and know-how caused common people to believe that ninja had supernatural powers. The Narutoverse ninja are different from real ones in many ways._

_Ninjutsu: lit. "ninja techniques". Effectively magic which costs chakra to cast. Many techniques belong to an element (Fire/Water/Wind/Earth/Lightning), and are stronger against one other element and weaker against another. A typical ninja will start out with an affinity for one element (which is required to successfully use it for techniques), and will have developed more by the time they reach Jōnin rank.  
_

_Ramen: Noodle-based dish of great deliciousness._

_Ryō: Unit of currency, based on a Japanese currency used in the days of real ninja._

___Sensei: lit. "further ahead in life". Term of respect for a teacher. I've tried hard to avoid using Japanese suffixes in an English-language work, but I haven't found an acceptable alternative for this one which doesn't sound awkward._

_____Shinobi:_ _Common contraction for "shinobi no mono", an alternative reading of the characters for "ninja". Means exactly the same thing.  
_

_Shuriken: lit. "hand palm blade" (sort of). Aka "ninja stars" or "throwing stars". In the Narutoverse, most ninja have improbably large supplies on them at all times, typically in leg pouches. Unlike real shuriken, Narutoverse shuriken are typically not poisoned._

___Taijutsu: lit. "body techniques". Basically martial arts, both armed and unarmed. Aside from certain advanced techniques, these typically do not require chakra use._

-o-

Naruto was in a good mood - the official photographer had told him he'd never taken such an outrageous ninja registration photo in his forty years of work. Naruto had taken his inspiration from a picture he'd seen on the back of a book of some guy called Jiraiya, and then liberally added details from all his favourite manga, until the final product could be guaranteed to instil nightmares, bed-wetting and permanent psychological trauma in anyone under the age of seven. Judging by the reactions he'd got on his way home (after the Hokage had caught him and told him to go wash it off, but failed to specify where or when), it was also capable of paralysing full-grown men for up to five seconds. His face was now practically a ninja weapon all by itself.

Nevertheless, he knew from long experience exactly how far the old man's patience could be stretched, so he did wash the face paint off before going to meet his new squad leader. He met up with Sasuke and Sakura on the way.

"Hey, Sakura. Feel like going for a date to celebrate our graduation?"

"Get bent, Naruto."

Sasuke ignored both of them and studied the clouds overhead. In other words, it was business as usual on all sides.

"I still can't believe I have to be in the same squad as you," Sakura muttered. "For one thing, didn't you get disqualified for cheating? How could you graduate when you got disqualified from the exam?"

"Oh, I stole the Hokage's secret scroll of forbidden techniques, and then beat up Mizuki-sensei. They couldn't _not_ let me graduate after that," Naruto replied nonchalantly.

Sasuke turned around at this. "Couldn't you make up something better, imbecile?"

"Like it or not, it's the truth, greaseball," Naruto boasted, shortly before feeling Sakura's wrathful fist descend right on top of his head.

"Ow! What was that for?!"

"For making up stupid lies," Sakura announced in the voice of a judge delivering a final sentence with no right of appeal. "Now come on, our new leader might get mad if we're late."

This concern turned out to be unfounded, as the rooftop that had been designated as their meeting place was completely empty.

Naruto sighed. "Figures. Knew I should have bought some manga on the way. I'd just finished saving up for the next issue of _Ikazuchi Saga_, too."

Sasuke pointedly rolled his eyes. "Another of your loser comics?"

"You got a problem with that?" Naruto glared.

"What if I do? What are you going to do about it?"

"How about this!" Naruto swung a punch at Sasuke's nose. Sasuke dodged effortlessly, then aimed a counter at Naruto's stomach. Before Sakura could so much as react, the two were busy fighting like they were on opposite sides of the Fourth Great Ninja War.

"Naruto! Sasuke! Will you two stop it?! Stop! I said stop!"

But the boys clearly weren't listening, and there was no way she was physically getting in the middle of that. Sakura sighed, found a nearby railing to sit on, pulled out a hand mirror and started adjusting her hair.

"Typical... just my luck to be in a squad where even the captain is some lazy bugger who can't even be bothered to show up to his own... gaah!"

A tall shinobi appeared out of nowhere in front of her. He was wearing a Leaf ninja vest over blue clothes, had spiky grey-white hair, and wore his headband over his left eye. Together with the half-mask covering his mouth and chin, this left little of his face clearly visible.

The man (probably) smiled. "I'm sorry, were you saying something?"

"Uhh... no. Definitely not. You must have misheard. Sir."

Sakura risked a glance behind the man, where the commotion had finally ceased. Sasuke had Naruto in a solid headlock, though the latter was doing his best to try to wriggle out of it. Both seemed considerably worse for wear, with Sasuke's hair messed up and his headband lying on the floor, and Naruto's jacket hanging open with a busted zip.

"So," the man continued, entirely unfazed, "let's start the self-introductions. My name is Hatake Kakashi, and I am a Leaf Jōnin. I have no intention of telling you my hobbies, my dreams or anything else about myself."

This was met with silence, but Naruto and Sasuke did separate and sort out their clothes.

"You with the atrocious orange outfit, you can go next."

"My name is Uzumaki Naruto!" Naruto proudly exclaimed. "I like ramen, Sakura and manga with cool fights. I hate Sasuke, high prices, spoilers and Sasuke. My hobbies are reading manga, playing pranks and thinking of new ways to play pranks. And my dream... is to become the world's greatest ramen chef!"

Kakashi found himself actually lost for words for several seconds.

"Ramen chef?"

"Sure! I'm going to develop my own secret style of ramen, travel the world, and challenge and defeat all the great ramen chefs in no-holds barred cooking showdowns. Then I'll open a ramen dojo and grow a long white beard and be known as Grandmaster Naruto. Oh, and I'll get cool tattoos, 'cause what's the point of the grandmaster gig if you can't have cool tattoos?"

"Oooh-kaaay... next."

"My name is Haruno Sakura. I like... um... well... I like..." Sakura squirmed while glancing meaningfully at the boy to her side. Kakashi found himself wondering, not for the first time, if the high pay and varied perks of being a Jōnin squad leader really made up for having to spend this much time around young girls.

"I hate Naruto," Sakura added in a burst of certainty. "As for my dream, I... um... it's..." She went back to throwing furtive yet strikingly obvious glances at the other boy.

There was only so much of this that Kakashi could put up with. "Next!"

"My name is Uchiha Sasuke," the black-haired boy announced with a strange intensity, as if this statement was in itself meant to be laden with profound meaning. "There are few things that I like, and a lot of things that I hate. I have no dreams, but there are two things I will do without fail. I will revive my clan... and I will defeat a certain man."

It should have just been nearly-teenage posturing, easy to brush off (or, in Sakura's case, mark down as further evidence of Sasuke's coolness), but all three listeners felt a chill go down their spines at the sheer intense hostility with which Sasuke imbued the last few words.

"OK..." Kakashi smiled a few seconds later, privately wondering whether this whole thing was a horrible nightmare brought on by overwork, or perhaps a particularly cruel genjutsu prank played by one of the more tiresome of his fellow Jōnin. "Now, there's something you haven't been told yet. There's one exam left before you can become Genin. At most, only nine people from your whole year can pass. It's also possible that all of you will fail, and _no-one_ will become Genin. I'm not going to beat about the bush here: this final exam is _hard_."

"What?!" Naruto exclaimed. "What do you mean, there's another exam? Then what did I beat Mizuki-sensei up for?!"

"Good job on that, by the way. I never liked that little brown-noser," Kakashi replied.

Sasuke and Sakura's jaws dropped. "You mean you weren't kidding?"

Kakashi went on as if he hadn't been interrupted. "In answer to your question, the graduation exam proved that you had the basic skills and competencies to become Genin. The _final_ exam tests whether you're actually ready to be one. Genin go on difficult, dangerous missions, many with a risk of death. We'd rather send someone back to the Academy - as many times as it takes - than let you throw your life away, as you definitely will if you're not prepared."

Sasuke, Sakura and Naruto exchanged glances. Then, each in their own way, they fought down the tendrils of fear Kakashi's comment had sent snaking through them.

"Meet me at 5 am tomorrow at the Training Grounds. Bring whatever equipment you like, within reason, because you won't be able to leave once we start."

Naruto raised his hand. "Kakashi-sensei, Kakashi-sensei, what does 'within reason' mean?"

Kakashi felt a sudden sense of impending doom. "It means you can only bring things you'd expect to be able to bring on a normal mission. There's a list of forbidden objects, like rare and hard-to-get chemicals or siege weaponry, plus the examiner has final say over what you can use."

Naruto nodded solemnly. Those were some solid if not flawless rules, and would require thought.

"And don't eat any breakfast beforehand. You'll regret it if you do," Kakashi added with what was probably an evil smile beneath his mask.

"Dismissed!"

-o-

"I see you all made it. Let's get started!" Kakashi announced upon his arrival at 6:23 am, cheerfully ignoring both the yawns and the death-promising glares.

"Now, the rules are simple. I have here two bells. To pass, you have to get one of these bells by noon. Anyone who doesn't have a bell come noon will fail and get sent back to the Academy. Any questions?"

Sakura raised her hand. "Why are there only two bells when there are three of us?"

"Because one of you will fail and be sent to the Academy," Kakashi explained simply. "Make sure it's not you.

"Now, if there's nothing else, I'm going to go over there and read my book. Come at me whenever you're ready."

After he wandered off, Naruto turned to the others. "Something's not right."

"What do you mean?" Sasuke narrowed his eyes.

Naruto recalled a conversation he'd had with Iruka-sensei the previous year.

-o-

"Iruka-sensei, how come there are always three people to a Genin team? Why isn't it two, or five, or nine? Yeah, nine would be great! You could get missions done three times as fast!"

Iruka, gratified by the attention from Naruto of all people, especially after class when the boy normally ran off before the bell even finished ringing, was more than ready to explain.

"Because our village survives by getting money from doing missions, we want as many teams successfully doing missions as possible, so we want to have lots of small teams rather than a few big ones. As for why it's three... Well, you see, Naruto, people have known for a long time that three's the minimum number of people you need to make an effective ninja team when each person can only be guaranteed to have a maximum of one well-developed skill. And then-"

"Wait, I don't get it."

Iruka thought about how to explain.

"Well, you play those role-playing video games on your TV, right?"

"Um." Naruto hesitated. "I don't actually have a TV. But I've played a couple with Kiba before."

Iruka mentally kicked himself for his insensitivity. Yes, many of Naruto's classmates, some of them from Leaf's wealthiest ninja clans, would have access to such luxuries. But Naruto himself was living on the Hokage's Orphans' Fund allowance, which Iruka knew from his own experience to be pitiful indeed thanks to the number of orphans left behind by the Night of Tragedy.

"Sorry, I forgot. Anyway, look at it like one of those. Your warrior can only hit things with his sword, and your archer can only shoot things with his bow, and your wizard can only throw fireballs at people, so on their own they're pretty weak. But if you put them together right, they can fight very tough monsters and eventually save the world."

Naruto nodded.

"It's the same for ninja. For example, one of the so-called ideal formations is having a taijutsu user up front, a powerful but vulnerable mid-range ninjutsu user in the middle, and a flexible long-range ninjutsu user at the back. The taijutsu user keeps enemies busy and stops them going after the others. The mid-range ninjutsu user takes out tough enemies without getting put in danger himself. And the long-range ninjutsu user keeps an eye on the battlefield, using his abilities to stop anyone catching his allies by surprise, and coming in to help whenever someone's in trouble."

Iruka had a sudden feeling that he was making things too complicated, but to his surprise, Naruto was nodding along with a serious look on his face.

"Another example is having two taijutsu users with compatible specialisations - like one doing straight physical damage and the other disabling enemies with special techniques - up front, and someone with long-range and utility techniques at the back. The point is that you get a balanced team that can take on any challenge, even if none of them might be able to do very much on their own. But you need three Genin. Two won't cut it, and if you have many more than that, it's better to split them into separate teams for flexibility."

"I get it! Thanks, Iruka-sensei! Hey, are we still on for ramen tonight?"

Iruka smiled. "Well, you did manage to scrape a pass on the test like you promised, so I guess I'd better hold up my end of the bargain."

Satisfied, Naruto ran off.

-o-

"Iruka-sensei told me once that you absolutely have to have three Genin on a team, or it doesn't work. So what's going to happen if he fails one of us and gets left with two Genin?" Naruto asked with a sincere expression of puzzlement.

There was silence for a second.

"I see!" Sasuke exclaimed. "Only having two bells means we have to fight each other for them instead of working as a team. He's got to know that, so it must be what he wants. He's not really trying to pick two out of three, he's just trying to set us against each other."

Sakura raised her eyebrows. "Oh, that makes sense! You're so smart, Sasuke!"

"So what do we do?" Naruto asked.

"We have to work as a team, because he won't be expecting that," Sasuke explained. "I looked him up in the public records yesterday. Apparently he's failed every single team he's tested since he started being a Genin team leader. I bet he did something like this to them, and then failed all three for lack of teamwork!"

"But we can't just charge in headfirst," Sakura added, keen to make a contribution. "I asked my parents about him. They say he's the famous Copy Ninja. He knows a thousand different techniques and he was a hero of the Third Great Ninja War. If we try to fight him normally, he'll wipe the floor with us."

A heavy, pessimistic silence settled over the area.

After a while, Naruto spoke up. "Hey, I've just remembered, there was a situation just like this one in chapter twenty-seven of _Ikazuchi Saga_! Saga and his two friends are facing the Dark Flame Master, and he's immune to Saga's Judgment Thunder. So what they do is this..."

Naruto talked quickly and excitedly. There was a lot of waving of arms. At one point, he started drawing diagrams on a piece of paper.

"That is the most ridiculously crazy plan I've heard in my entire life," Sasuke commented when Naruto was done. "But I bet Kakashi-sensei won't see it coming, so maybe it's worth a shot. There are a couple of big gaping flaws in it, though."

Naruto looked surprised, while inwardly being relieved that Sasuke had spotted them. He _was_ pretty smart, Naruto's daily assertions to the contrary aside, and even Sakura had her moments, but the plan needed flaws so it wouldn't look suspicious to have him propose it, and at the same time it would be a disaster if they ended up being overlooked.

_Some discussion later..._

"Oh, wait!" Naruto exclaimed. "I'm an idiot! This plan won't work - we don't have anything like Miki's Gates of Void technique to let us swap places with nearby objects!"

Sakura sneered. "You really are an idiot, Naruto. We can use the Substitution Technique for that. I'm actually pretty good at it."

"Oh. Then I guess we're good to go. Can I be Saga?"

Sasuke rolled his eyes. "Of course you're Saga. It's pretty obvious from the plan who gets what role. You're Saga, the loudmouth hero, Sakura's Miki, the kunoichi full of hidden tricks, and I'm Ogun, the mysterious sage who always saves your ass."

Naruto gave Sasuke a funny look. "I thought you didn't read manga because it was for losers."

"I don't. Shut up."

-o-

"Your reign of terror is over, Kakashi-sensei! Feel the lightning fist of justice!"

Without looking up from his book, Kakashi blocked Naruto's punch with his free left hand. Then the kick. Then the three-punch combo, followed by a low leg sweep. Hmm, this was getting interesting. Osamu had just proposed to Izuna, not realising that Izuna was really Eri in disguise. What would Eri do, knowing that Kanagiri the butler was due to come home any minute?

There was a glint of light from the edge of Kakashi's vision. In one smooth movement, he noted the page, closed his book, put it down on the grass next to him, drew a kunai and moved to block the shuriken coming at him.

However, the shuriken was a clone, and disappeared into smoke upon meeting his defence. At the same time as it did so, Naruto redoubled his attack, presumably trying to take advantage of Kakashi's distraction. It still wasn't enough to require more than one hand.

Kakashi glanced up. Sakura was running towards him, but as the only person he could see who could have thrown the shuriken at that angle, she had to be a clone too. Kakashi reached out to pick his book back up...

"Substitution Technique!"

With a poof, Sakura - not a clone - replaced his beloved signed first edition volume of Makeout Paradise. This, however, was not Kakashi's main concern. His main concern was that his hand, instead of touching the book, was now resting solidly on Sakura's chest.

"Kyaaa! Kakashi-sensei, you pervert!" Sakura screamed.

Kakashi jerked his hand back. He had sudden visions of the headlines.

"Respected Jōnin caught molesting underage Genin girl during exam".

"We always knew he liked reading porn in front of kids, but we never thought he'd go this far, say colleagues".

"Works of pervert-inspiring writer Jiraiya banned from sale in the Five Great Ninja Countries after 'Number One Fan' Leaf ninja jailed for child molestation".

He was snapped out of his panic by the sudden sensation of hostile intent on a scale he hadn't felt since the war. Looking to his left, he noticed that Naruto had now transformed into several hundred shadow clones, all of them with kunai in their hands and flames of the purest homicidal fury in their eyes.

"Don't you dare touch Sakura, you bastard!"

The clones dove at him from every direction - left, front, back, even above. Their numbers blocked out the sunlight, and Kakashi started calculating his options with lightning speed. Should he go full-on taijutsu and try to take out the clones before they overwhelmed him with sheer mass, or should he dodge in the one direction remaining to him and pop them with shuriken once he'd moved out of strike range? He'd decided at the start of the test that he wouldn't let mere Academy graduates push him into using ninjutsu. However, at that moment...

"Fire Element: Great Fireball Technique!"

Suddenly, the one direction that wasn't filled with clones, Kakashi's right, was instead filled with a rapidly approaching enormous ball of fire.

Kakashi gave an inward sigh of resignation, changed plans, and started to form seals almost faster than the eye could see.

That was when Sakura reached out and grabbed the bells off his waist.

"Earth Element: Subterranean Escape Technique!"

"Substitution Technique!"

When the smoke of three hundred clones simultaneously popping cleared away, all that was left in the clearing was the charred remnant of a log.

-o-

"Well, gentlemen, it was an impressive effort", Kakashi commented, looking across the field at Naruto and Sasuke. Sakura, tied and gagged at his feet, had her right hand closed in a death grip.

"But Sakura has both bells, and I have Sakura. It seems that either way, you two lose."

"Not so fast!" Sasuke said loudly. "We have information that you value a lot more than the hostage." He held up Kakashi's book. "Give us Sakura and the bells, and you can have your book back. Otherwise..." he smiled, "I feel another Fire Element technique coming on."

Kakashi raised his eyebrows. "Well, now. A magnificently underhanded move. You might have ninja potential yet. But the battlefield isn't a supermarket - you don't get two-for-one deals here. If you want Sakura in exchange for the book, you can have her - but I keep the bells. Maybe I'll give you another chance to get them, but you won't be able to catch me off guard again."

"Or I could offer you a deal." Kakashi looked them in the eye, one after the other. "You take the bells, and I keep Sakura. She's a prisoner of war anyway, and since she's the one who got herself caught, she's not your responsibility. With those two bells, there's enough for both of you to pass. Sakura will go back to the Academy, and everyone will live happily ever after. How about it?"

He looked down at Sakura. Her eyes glistened with tears. She looked at Sasuke and Naruto, seemed to come to a decision, and then slowly, very slowly, she opened up her hand to let Kakashi take the bells.

"Hold it!" Naruto shouted. "You can keep your bells. Give us Sakura. No matter what he's up against, Uzumaki Naruto doesn't abandon his friends! That's my way of the ninja!"

Kakashi looked from him to Sasuke. "Is that your final answer?"

Sasuke nodded. "The three of us got those bells off you before, and we'll get them off you again. We're swapping the book for Sakura... and then you're going down."

Kakashi shook his head. "Well, that was your one chance to make the right decision. And I'm afraid to say that all three of you..."

"... pass!"

-o-

After untying Sakura and reuniting Kakashi with his book, the four of them were walking back to the entrance of the Training Grounds.

"In the shinobi world, those who don't obey the rules are trash," Kakashi told them. "But those who abandon their teammates are even worse than trash. You showed impressive teamwork back there, and even more importantly, you showed loyalty. Starting tomorrow, you will be Team Seven under my leadership."

"Yay!"

"All right!"

Even Sasuke was unsuccessfully trying to hide a smile.

"So clear up a couple of things for me," Kakashi said. "Where did the clone shuriken come from?"

"I hid a clone in the bushes," Sakura explained, "and had her throw a shuriken past me as I ran forwards so it looked like I was throwing it."

Kakashi looked impressed. "And the log?"

"That was me," Sasuke responded. "I brought it in range of Sakura while you were busy freaking out about groping her."

"Um." Kakashi said. "I now realise that it was an ingenious stratagem on your part in order to throw me off balance, so would you mind never mentioning it again? To anyone?"

The chorus of agreement was a little too quick for Kakashi's comfort. He made a note to himself to get blackmail material on the three as quickly as possible - for his own protection.

"And Naruto, three hundred shadow clones? What possessed you to spend so much chakra? You could have died."

"Don't be silly, Kakashi-sensei!" Naruto laughed. "After the first couple of rows, those were all normal clones. And even then I only summoned that many because they were only meant to last a few seconds."

Kakashi shook his head. "You three are full of surprises."

"Well, I have to go and fill out Genin team paperwork. I'll be in touch tomorrow with your first mission."

As soon as he was gone, Naruto turned to Sakura. "That was amazing acting back there, Sakura. I can't believe you actually managed to cry on command."

Sasuke nodded in agreement.

Sakura blushed. "Thanks. You guys were good too. Well, Sasuke was, anyway. Naruto, you were totally overdoing it."

"Aheh." Naruto rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment. "I was quoting _Ikazuchi Saga_ for most of that. It just seemed so appropriate, and besides, when else am I going to get the chance?"

"The important thing is that he bought it," Sasuke observed. "We just outplayed a Jōnin on our first day as Genin. Maybe this team has a future after all."

"That reminds me," Sakura commented in a deceptively sweet voice. "Naruto, why didn't you mention to me that getting groped by Kakashi-sensei was part of the plan?"

"What? But-"

The force of her uppercut was a wonder to behold.

"What did _I _dooooooooooo..." Naruto screamed as he vanished into the stratosphere.

"Hey, Sasuke, want to go on a date to celebrate our victory?"

But Sasuke didn't answer. He was busy watching Naruto's trajectory with a thoughtful look on his face.


	3. Chapter 2

_A/N: Thanks for all the kind words, everyone. Please do leave more reviews, particularly if you can point to ways I can write better, or spot plot holes that need filling in. I'm setting a tentative schedule of weekly updates for now._

_Responding to questions/comments:_

_- I wasn't thinking of this as a rationalist fic when I came up with it, just as a "what if characters in general and Naruto in particular were smarter?" experiment. I leave it to the reader to decide whether it has actually come out as one or not. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that unlike Mr Potter-Evans-Verres and many of his counterparts, Smart!Naruto has had an exceedingly patchy education and no role models to speak of for rational behaviour. It remains to be seen how far he will get as an autodidact._

_- I am well aware of the many Gary Sue possibilities in store for Naruto. As with canon, I intend to up the challenge rating over time, but rest assured that some of the antagonists I have queued up for later on are already looking worryingly invincible. My approach to writing LUD battle scenes is "here is the challenge; how would Naruto respond to it?" If I can't find an answer that doesn't result in a Total Party Kill, I don't lower the challenge. I just think harder until I come up with something._

_- The other characters will get their chances to shine, but Naruto has an enormous starting advantage compared to the other Genin, and it will take training and experience before they can discover and refine their unique strengths the way he has._

_- I don't read the Naruto manga (so no spoilers in reviews, please), and my watching history in fansub terms is ANBU-Aone - Dattebayo - Taka. So I either use their translations for technique names etc., or I use my own if I find them unsatisfactory._

-o-

Naruto was officially fed up with being a Genin. Weeding gardens? Moving furniture? Mowing lawns? And the cat, dear heavens, let's not even talk about the cat. Meanwhile the D-rank mission pay was pathetic (and that was coming from _him_, a guy who had to count every single ryō to get through the month), Sakura was a prima donna who wouldn't deign to dirty her hands with actual manual labour (unless the labour was inflicting violence on his person), and swapping ever more creative barbs with Sasuke was the only thing keeping him sane.

Consequently, Naruto was in a pretty foul mood when he came home. He was just starting to mellow out over some ramen and a library copy of _Clone Techniques: Tips from the Masters _(happily, one perk of Genin status was that he now potentially had the full might of the Leaf Village government behind him, and therefore could no longer be automatically refused membership) when he heard someone knock on his door.

He opened it violently. "I told you, that smell isn't coming from _my _flat, you old bat!"

Hinata gave him a puzzled look. "Um, is this a bad time?"

"Oh, sorry, Hinata. There've been... issues," Naruto explained. "What's up?"

"I saw Chōji when I was walking past his house, and he asked me to return some manga for him," Hinata explained. "He said he'd promised to give it back today, but he's hurt his ankle and he can't walk all the way over here."

"Huh." Chōji had in fact promised no such thing. He'd borrowed the first five volumes of _Burning Fighting Fighter_, an old series Naruto knew off by heart and therefore had no need to get back anytime soon.

Hinata duly handed over a bag containing several manga volumes.

"Thanks, Hinata. I appreciate it." Naruto stepped back.

Hinata didn't move. She started to fidget.

"Um, was there anything else?" Naruto asked.

"Naruto, I... I..." Hinata trailed off awkwardly.

Naruto, tired and perhaps less sensitive to social cues than usual, took her lack of speech as a no.

"OK, then. Catch you later!"

As Naruto started to shut the door, Hinata suddenly said something very loudly.

"I need to talk to you!"

Naruto opened the door again to see a bright red Hinata looking like she wished the earth would open up and swallow her.

"I'm sorry?"

"Um..." she started fidgeting again. Then, in a very quiet voice, "I need to talk to you."

"Uh, go on?"

"M-May I please come in?" Hinata asked in a trembling voice more suited to a line like "may I please be eaten by lions?"

Naruto nodded. "Sure."

Then he took a look back at his flat.

"Hold that thought."

He shut the door. Hinata could still hear his voice from within.

"Multiple Shadow Clone Technique!"

What followed was a cacophony of voices, all Naruto's.

"Quick, put that away!"

"It expired _how_ many months ago? Get rid of it - now! No, I don't care how many of you it destroys in the process!"

"Clear some space for her to sit down!"

"Is that...? Yikes, she can't see that! Get rid of it! I don't know, hide it under the bed or something!"

"Watch where you're waving that!"

"When did we get that thing there?"

"Last year. No idea what it is, but it looks really cool and it only cost five ryō. Put it in the corner over there."

"Look out, coming through!" (This last was followed by a clang like that of lots of metallic things falling on the floor in a heap.)

A couple of minutes later, the door opened again.

"Come on in."

Hinata entered with some trepidation. She was inside Naruto's flat. The flat of Naruto. The actual place where Naruto lived. It was smaller than she'd expected, and also remarkably messy given the apparent emergency cleaning. Curiously, this actually made her feel more at ease. It was such a nice contrast to the spartan atmosphere of the Hyūga clan compound - in fact, her father would probably disown her on the spot if she ever left her room in such a state. Whereas here the mess was somehow OK, even comforting.

"So what's up?"

Hinata looked down. "I... um, I have a confession to make."

Naruto, whose previous acquaintance with Hinata was mostly as "that quiet girl with no pupils and a cool hoodie", couldn't begin to guess what she might have to confess to him.

"This one time, I was walking past your flat by coincidence, and I heard your voice, and it was... well, overlapping with itself," Hinata began. Her speech was hesitant and filled with pauses, which allowed Naruto time to reflect, for example, on the fact that his flat was on the first floor of a semi-detached building, and thus not on the way to _anywhere_.

"So... so I got curious, and I Looked, and I saw you playing shogi with your own clone. And I wondered why you'd do that, when you'd probably just end up making the same moves as each other, so I kept watching. At first, I thought you were just... well, messing around, because all the pieces seemed to be in random places, and I couldn't work out how were you deciding where to move them."

Naruto kept a neutral expression on his face. There were a number of ways this conversation could go, and he had to work out how to steer it away from the more disastrous ones, while at the same time paying close attention to what Hinata was actually saying.

"And then your clone said 'checkmate', and I looked at the board again, and suddenly I realised that all its moves had been part of one enormous strategy. Then you played some other games and... um... I watched those as well. And they were all really high-level games too. And I..."

Hinata broke off. She looked at Naruto, as if trying to gauge his response, but he did his best to give nothing away.

Hinata took a deep breath. "And... and I sort of followed you when you went to the Training Grounds on your own... and I saw you coming up with all these amazing uses for the Academy techniques. I kept wondering why no-one taught us things like that."

Her voice was getting quieter.

"And... um... I followed you many other times after that. I kept wanting to talk to you, but... I was afraid you'd tell me to go away... so I just kept watching."

"So you were spying on me," Naruto said angrily, his already-low patience just not up to the challenge today. It wasn't on his mental map of where he wanted the conversation to go, but that was getting harder to hold onto as his emotions intensified.

Hinata flinched as if he'd hit her.

"I'm sorry! I'm really sorry! I know it was wrong, and I shouldn't have, and I'm really sorry, and if it bothers you I'll never do it again..." she trailed off.

Naruto could see tears forming in her eyes. It made him feel sorry for her, and that in itself made him feel angry all over again because she was making him feel sorry for her when he was supposed to be feeling angry. Now he was feeling emotionally blackmailed, and angry, and guilty about feeling angry, and angry about feeling guilty, and the more he thought about it the more tangled the whole thing got, so after a point he just gritted his teeth and tried to focus on the facts rather than the warped spiky mess inside him.

For a while, no-one spoke, as both Hinata and Naruto independently struggled to compose themselves.

"So is that what you came to tell me?" Naruto finally asked.

Hinata shook her head.

"N-No, that's not it. There's... there's something I've wanted to tell you... ever since I saw you that day."

She paused.

"I - I always thought... I thought you were an amazingly brave person for never giving up when things seemed hard. And I always wished I could be confident the way you are. And then..."

Still shaky, Hinata took a second to collect her thoughts. Naruto, caught completely off guard by the compliments, quietly waited for her.

"I discovered you were clever as well. Clever, and creative and... cunning. So cunning you made everyone in the class think you were... well... not very bright. And that's when I knew. I..."

She stopped. Whatever she was trying to say was clearly pushing her courage to the limit.

"Naruto, I..."

Naruto swallowed. She couldn't be...

"I want you to train me."

Naruto was momentarily dumbstruck. His anger drained away; there just wasn't enough room left for both it and the confusion.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"I want you to train me," Hinata repeated.

"Me? Train you? Train you in what?" Naruto asked incredulously.

"I... I want to be like you," Hinata told him.

Naruto shook his head. "That's ridiculous."

He sat down heavily on the bed. Hinata, without thinking about it, sat down on a nearby chair.

"Hinata, you've got friends who like you, and a loving family. You don't want to be like me. I don't think anyone would want to be like me."

Hinata looked up sharply. "You're wrong."

That was as assertive as he'd ever heard her. He gave her a questioning look.

She was quiet for a few seconds. "Sorry, can we not talk about that now? Please? I... don't know how to say what I want to say without putting my foot in it... so can we leave it for now?"

Naruto nodded, still somewhat confused. "So what exactly is it that you want from me?"

"I want to know how to be confident and clever and creative... the way you are. I don't know if you can teach something like this, but please... if you can, I want to learn."

Naruto thought about this. He'd never even considered whether you could deliberately teach qualities of character, never mind how you'd do it. He knew that, in theory, the Academy was meant to inculcate virtues like loyalty and hard work alongside the knowledge and skills expected of a ninja, but from his observations people still came out with pretty much the same personalities as when they went in.

"Um... I can pay you," Hinata ventured, taking his silence as reluctance.

Naruto looked up. He wasn't sure how he felt about this. Heavens knew he needed the money, but was this a thing that you took money for? Especially from a fellow Genin who had apparently exhausted a year's supply of courage just to ask for it?

"I don't have much - my father doesn't give me pocket money because he says I'll just spend it on frivolous things - but when I need money there are some old people near the edge of the village who let me do chores for them, out where no-one from my clan is likely to go. And I have some savings from the money we get for missions. So I _can_ pay you."

Naruto shook his head. "No. Wow, you're actually worse off than me. How's that even possible? I mean, aren't you the heir to the most powerful clan in Leaf?"

Hinata looked down and said nothing. Naruto decided not to press the matter.

"Hmm." He considered. "Why do you want training so badly, anyway?"

Hinata looked uncomfortable. "I'm sorry. I know I'm being a pain... but this is really hard for me. I'm not good at talking to people. So could we just... generally leave talking about me for another time?"

Hinata tensed, as if expecting Naruto to lose his patience with her and lash out.

"Sure."

She looked oddly surprised, but she did relax a little.

"Tell you what," Naruto said. "I need some time to think about how you'd train someone in this sort of thing. Why don't you come back same time tomorrow and we'll talk about it some more."

Hinata nodded, with a somewhat overwhelmed expression that looked like it was looping all the way through excitement and back into anxiety.

"In the meantime, I want you to promise me that you won't mention any of this to anyone - not the idea of me training you, and not me being smarter than I appear."

Hinata nodded again. "I promise."

She started to fidget. "Um... Naruto... if you don't mind me asking... why _do_ you act like you're less bright than you are?"

"Let's leave that for another time as well," Naruto replied. "Now it's getting dark - you'd better go home. And if this ends up going anywhere, you'll need think about what you're going to tell people when they ask you where you're spending so much time."

With that, he showed her out, still inwardly a bit dazed at the turn the conversation had taken. He'd considered a variety of possibilities when she started speaking, up to and including having to deal with blackmail, but someone actually wanting training? From him? For an idea that was so obviously wrong on so many levels, it was nevertheless oddly compelling.

-o-

It was a warm, sunny day, and Team Seven were enjoying some healthy exercise by the artificial riverbank. If by "enjoying some healthy exercise" we mean "picking up rubbish while grumbling continuously".

"Why do they even _need _ninja to do this?" Naruto complained loudly. "Anyone, and I mean _anyone_, could pick up rubbish. We should be off escorting civilians through danger, or hunting deadly criminals, or whatever it is _real _ninja do."

"Quit moaning, imbecile," Sasuke called out from some distance away. "It's probably you dragging down our average IQ to the point where they won't trust our team with anything else."

"Nah, I think it's that they know you're so incompetent you'd blow up the village if they gave you a mission that needed any sort of weapons," Naruto was quick to reply.

There was a moment of silence in which both boys had the same thought: there was something curiously familiar about this whole thing.

-o-

A much smaller Naruto's hand closed gleefully on the last dumpling remaining at the outdoor stall. "I'll take this!"

That's odd. Did his voice always have an echo?

Naruto looked to his right to see a black-haired boy with his hand on the other half of the same dumpling.

"Hey, I was here first!" he shouted.

"No, I was here first!" the other boy retorted.

The shopkeeper had watched them both grab it at the exact same time.

"Buzz off, kid, the Uchiha got it first."

Both boys ignored him, and slammed down the money for the dumpling on the counter with their spare hands. The shopkeeper wasn't about to complain at this development.

A tug of war ensued as the boys both tried to walk away from the stall in separate directions, the overall motion carrying them down the riverbank and towards the river.

Sasuke watched the other boy for his reaction. Having heard his name, would he let go of the dumpling because his parents had taught him to show pity to the poor Uchiha orphan? Or would he snatch the dumpling and run because he'd been taught not to be anywhere near the cursed Uchiha child who had suspiciously survived the massacre of his entire clan? In the end, those seemed to be the only two options where other people were concerned.

However, what actually happened was that Sasuke won the tug of war. He continued to watch the other boy warily, but could not have expected what happened next.

The boy struck a dramatic pose and pointed a finger at him. "I challenge you to a duel!"

Sasuke burst into helpless laughter.

Naruto turned red. He'd just finished reading _Amazing Samurai Adventures_, and apparently some part of him hadn't yet come back from the Country of Iron.

"Are you some kind of imbecile?" Sasuke asked when he could breathe.

"Shut up, greaseball!" Naruto retaliated.

"Greaseball?" Sasuke replied. "You're insulting my _hair_? What are you, a girl?"

"No," Naruto barely hesitated, "I'm the guy who's going to kick your ass!"

"Bring it on!"

The two boys threw themselves at each other, and before either knew it, they were rolling up and down the riverbank, kicking and punching and elbowing with everything they'd got. The dumpling got squashed early on, and was forgotten thereafter.

Given where they were, and the fact that each had forgotten absolutely everything except the desire to beat the other, it was only a matter of time until they found themselves rolling into the river.

Splash!

The water succeeded in ending the fight where the Hokage himself would have failed. The boys separated and climbed out, each thoroughly drenched. It seemed like a good time to go home and dry off, especially for Naruto, who only had this one pair of trousers.

"I'll get your gravestone ready for the next time I see you, loser. What name do you want on it?" Sasuke called out as he was about to leave.

"Uzumaki Naruto, Slayer of... what was your name again?"

"Uchiha Sasuke, and-"

"Right. Uzumaki Naruto, Slayer of Uchiha Sasuke. Make sure you get it in marble or granite, not the cheap stuff."

Naruto grinned and ran off while he still had the last word.

And with that, the boys went their separate ways, each glowing inside just a little.

-o-

"Think fast, greaseball!"

Sasuke was snapped out of his reminiscence by a drinks can heading towards his head at near-relativistic speed. He caught it by luck as much as skill, and did not hesitate to retaliate. However, he was too smart to just do the same thing back. His rock, lobbed with perfect kunai-throwing form, went into the river right next to Naruto, splashing him from head to toe.

"Oh, that's it!" Naruto growled. "You want to see who can get who wet? Believe me, I can get you wetter than you can imagine!"

Kakashi, who was standing nearby, broke into a sudden coughing fit. When it was over, he waved his arms.

"Naruto! Sasuke! Sakura! I just happen to have a super special prize for whoever collects the most rubbish in the next five minutes."

Both boys looked up.

"Hah. Too easy," Sasuke called out.

"Oh, really?" Naruto replied. "Maybe you just don't know how fast I am."

"It's on!"

Within five minutes, the riverbank was restored to a state of pristine cleanliness which it had likely not known since the day Senju Hashirama so thoughtlessly founded the Hidden Village of Leaf here. Kakashi carefully examined both competitors' sacks.

"Winner: Uchiha Sasuke!"

Sasuke smirked.

Naruto muttered "I knew I should have used my shadow clones."

"The winner gets my super special prize: not having to carry the rubbish to the recycling station."

Sasuke smirked some more.

"The runner-up, Uzumaki Naruto, gets the consolation prize: also not having to carry the rubbish to the recycling station."

Naruto grinned. Sasuke's smirk faded a little.

"Sakura, that means you get to carry it all."

"What?!" demanded an outraged Sakura. "I wasn't even competing!"

"Exactly," Kakashi nodded. "Either you pull your own weight, or you pull other people's weights. That's what it means to be part of a team."

-o-

_Later that afternoon..._

"All right, I've thought about it."

Hinata listened attentively.

"I don't think you can fake your way to courage or confidence, and you certainly can't do it with intelligence. Or maybe you can, but that's not what you're trying to achieve."

Hinata nodded. She was intrigued to hear Naruto in lecture mode; once, the idea would have seemed as bizarre as Shino cultivating Venus flytraps.

"Some people seem to be naturally confident. Look at Kiba - dumb as a brick, no special talents apart from what he gets from his clan, and yet he still acts like he owns the place."

"Th-That's not very nice, Naruto. Kiba is a good person," Hinata interjected.

"I know he is. He's one of my best friends. But point to the part of my description that you think is wrong."

Hinata said nothing.

"I don't think you and I can do what he does. Maybe it's our backgrounds, maybe it's something else, but we need a reason to feel good about ourselves. Something we can be proud of."

"Like what?"

"Like things we're good at, or things we like about our characters. I'm proud of my intelligence. I'm proud of the fact that I always try to figure out how things fit together, and look for unexplored possibilities, where other people just accept things as they are. I'm proud of the fact that I've never given up, even though most of the world has hated me and tried to screw me over my entire life. You see what I mean?"

Hinata's eyes widened with distress towards the end of this explanation.

"Most of the world?" she echoed.

"Most of the world," Naruto stated flatly. "Except maybe half a dozen amazing people. And later our classmates at the Academy, but I had to work hard for that."

"By acting like you were... um...?" Hinata asked, then stopped suddenly, realising the potential for unintended insult.

"Ask yourself this, Hinata," Naruto replied. "Forgetting me for a second, who's the smartest, most talented person in our age group?"

Hinata didn't have to think long. "Uchiha Sasuke."

"And how many friends does Sasuke have?"

Hinata was silent.

"Exactly. Intelligence and talent might win you admiration, but they don't get you affection. I picked up on that early on," Naruto explained with a tinge of bitterness to his voice.

"That's... that's completely unfair!" Hinata was looking upset on his behalf. It was an unusual experience for Naruto, and somewhat touching. But he refused to allow himself to get distracted just now.

"It is. But this isn't about 'fair', it's about recognising how life actually is. When you're smarter than everyone else, it makes them jealous, or uncomfortable, or suspicious. They start treating you like you're a different kind of person from them. If you're lucky, they'll just put you on a pedestal. If not, they'll ostracise you."

"I'm telling you this because the only thing I know how to teach you is how to think like me. And if you learn to think like me, you might have to face the same problems I do. Are you sure you're ready for that?"

Hinata was quiet for a long time.

"Naruto, how many friends do you think _I _have?"

"Huh?" Naruto hadn't seen this one coming at all. "I don't know, I've never thought about it. But I've seen you with Sakura and Ino before - obviously, not both at the same time these days - and you get on OK with your teammates, don't you?"

Hinata sighed. "Um... let me put it another way. What do _you_ know about me, Naruto? Apart from what I told you yesterday?"

Naruto stopped to think. "Well... you're the heir to the Hyūga Clan. You can use the Byakugan. You've got OK test scores, not bad but not top of the class. You're kind of shy and you don't say much. You do this thing with your fingers a lot. You... um..."

"That's all _anyone _knows about me."

Naruto looked up at this. "I'm sure that's not-"

"I'm a wallflower, Naruto." Hinata's voice contained a kind of tension Naruto didn't think he'd ever heard before. "If I disappeared tomorrow, I don't think anyone outside my family would notice until I was needed for a mission. I don't _have_ any popularity to lose."

Looking closely, Naruto noticed that Hinata's hands, held in tight little fists, were trembling. That admission had not come easily to her.

"I'd notice."

"What?"

"If you disappeared, I mean," Naruto clarified. "I know I don't know you very well, but I think it must have taken a lot of courage to come talk to me the way you did. Someone being that brave will always leave an impression."

Hinata blushed. "I'm not brave at all. But... thank you."

An awkward silence settled over the small flat.

"So," Naruto stood up with exaggerated excitement, "it's time for shogi!"

He pulled out a game board and set it on the kitchen table.

"Shogi?" Hinata asked, moving tentatively to the chair opposite the one he was presumably going to use.

"Of course! Do you know what 'emergent' means?" he asked as he started setting up pieces.

Hinata shook her head.

"It's what happens when you take a bunch of simple rules and they interact to result in very complex patterns and effects. In shogi, the only rules are how the pieces move, plus a few special ones for promotion and such." He paused. "Erm, you _do_ know the rules of shogi, right?"

Hinata nodded. "My father tried playing with me before, but he gave up when I wasn't very good."

Naruto wasn't sure how to respond to this. "Anyway, you take a set of very simple rules, but when you put them together, you get deep, complex strategy. You can learn the rules of shogi in ten minutes. You can spend a lifetime getting good at it."

"I see. And this will teach me to think how you think?"

"Absolutely." Naruto was not at all sure it would do any such thing, but it seemed like a good place to start and see what happened. "First you get good at spotting patterns and possibilities. Then you learn to find your own blind spots. Then you learn to identify the dominant paradigm and look for alternative ones."

"I'm... not sure I followed that last part." Hinata looked nervous, as if she expected any failure to keep up to result in an immediate end to the training.

"I picked up the language from a book I found in the library the other day," Naruto explained, while quietly kicking himself - he thought he'd completely ditched the habit of going up speech registers when he got excited. "Gotta tell you, having free access to that place is fantastic. What it means is... say you're playing shogi. Your objective is to win by putting the enemy king in checkmate."

Hinata nodded.

"What if you want to win a different way? For example, maybe the person you're playing against is just too good, but you really need to win. Then you might go for a strategy that isn't as effective, but is really really annoying, until they get flustered and start making lots of mistakes. Or you might play really defensively, so that they despair of getting through your defences before it's time for them to go home, and try to rush their strategy - and again, make lots of mistakes. Or maybe you want to let them win so they think they're smarter than you, and then you can completely slaughter them during a more important game later, like in a championship. You see where I'm going with this?"

Hinata nodded slowly. "You're saying that... there are lots of different things you can do to get what you want, but first you have to let go of the idea that there's only one way to win."

Naruto beamed. "Exactly."

"So... let's play?" Hinata asked hesitantly, as if she expected him to suddenly say "no" and pack the whole thing in.

-o-

"Again!"

-o-

"Again! This time, your objective is to take as many pieces as possible."

-o-

"Again! This time, your objective is to make the game last for as many moves as possible."

-o-

"Again! This time, your objective is to surprise me."

-o-

"Again! Wait, what time is it? Aaargh!"

"Eek, my father is going to kill me! Bye, Naruto!"

That night, Naruto stayed up late making notes. You can learn a lot about a person by watching them play a game you're very familiar with, and he was starting to get some more ideas for further training, from games to mental exercises and reading recommendations. Hinata was putting a great deal of trust in him by doing something like this, and he had no intention of letting her down. Plus, the whole thing seemed like a lot of fun, and he badly needed something to take his mind off the tedium of D-rank missions.

The possibility of gaining an equal through the process never once occurred to him. It was impossible. And unreasonable. And way too much pressure to put on someone like Hinata. And ran counter to everything he believed about human nature. And anyway, even if genius could be taught, that in no way meant that he, Uzumaki Naruto, had the skill and know-how necessary to teach it. No, the whole idea was preposterous and had never even crossed his mind.

Naruto was in the middle of drawing a huge sprawling decision-making flowchart with at least five different colours of crayon when he finally fell asleep.


	4. Chapter 3

Hinata was buzzing with excitement. After countless shogi matches and mental training exercises (mostly really bizarre lateral thinking puzzles she suspected Naruto was making up himself), as well as her nightly homework of playing shogi against her clone, he'd finally declared her ready for practical training and taken her to the Training Grounds.

Beyond the joy of advancing to a new level of training, there was another layer of expectation making her heart beat faster. Her and Naruto, alone in the vast expanse of the Training Grounds. His attention focused on her and her only. Their bodies in continuous, close contact...

Hinata shook her head. No. Whatever she may dream about at other times, whatever their relationship may _be_ at other times, here and now they were master and apprentice. This training time was sacred, set aside from the thoughts and feelings of daily life, and she would not dishonour it by showing less than total dedication. Besides, she could always fantasise to her heart's content afterwards.

"All right," Naruto announced, oblivious to Hinata's many thoughts. "Let's start off by seeing how good you are at taijutsu."

Hinata settled into a neutral Gentle Fist stance and waited for Naruto to come at her. Within a matter of seconds, she realised that he was _good_. Not on the level of the Hyūga experts her father had her spar against, of course, but far better than anything he'd ever displayed at the Academy. She said as much when she next caught her breath.

"Well, the teachers at the Academy mostly hated me too much to actually teach me anything, so when I stuck to the Academy style, I didn't have much to go on," Naruto explained. "Most of what I know comes from provoking people into trying to kill me, and then learning from their styles. You'd be amazed at how quickly you pick things up when you regularly fight people much better than you are. It's even better when they're angry enough to use techniques they'd normally try to keep secret."

"And now I have shadow clones as well," he added. "They're not as good as real people for picking up new moves from, but they're always available, they give me complete freedom to experiment, and they do a great job of showing me my own weaknesses. I get great mileage out of them when my normal partners aren't available."

"Oh." Hinata looked at him. "So whom _do_ you normally spar with?"

The answer surprised her.

"Sasuke, of course. What, you think I piss him off just for the fun of it?"

Hinata considered this in light of everything she knew about the two boys. "Actually... that _is _what I think."

Naruto shrugged. "All right, you got me there. But I've learned more from doing that than from all the Academy teachers put together. I never said this and you can't repeat it, but that guy's taijutsu is really something."

Hinata giggled.

Naruto decided this was a good time to move away from the subject. "Let's step up the pace a little!"

Naruto threw out a quick punch, then immediately moved to avoid her counter. Within a few exchanges, it became obvious that while Hinata had a very respectable defence, her attack was rather half-hearted by comparison. Naruto was just starting to think about the implications of this when he slipped on a wet leaf, and instinctively grabbed Hinata (who'd just moved in close to take advantage of an opening) for support.

The Gentle Fist Style is in fact surprisingly poorly adapted for defence against grappling, with its best grapple counters being advanced moves relying on chakra emission. This weakness is in no way ameliorated by being a highly flustered twelve-year old girl.

Hinata went down, with Naruto on top of her. Naruto managed to avoid headbutting her as they landed, but his movement instead brought his mouth up, and his lips brushed gently against hers. At this, Hinata gave a squeak, went bright red and collapsed in a dead faint.

Naruto froze. "Hinata? Uh, Hinata?"

In a strange sort of karmic revenge for the suffering of Kakashi-sensei, a script started writing itself in his head.

Hinata: (waking up) "Kyaaaa! Naruto, you pervert! How could you take advantage of me like that?"

Naruto: "What? No! Hinata, I swear I never did anything!"

Hinata: "Do you take me for a fool? Get out of my sight. I never want to see you again!"

Exit stage left.

Hinata's father: (entering stage left) "How dare you violate my poor, naive, innocent daughter who also happens to be my precious heir?!"

Naruto: "What? No, it's just a misunder-"

Hinata's father: (glowing with a blue aura of doom) "No excuses. You will pay for your crimes. Hyūga Certain Kill Ultimate Death Technique: Fist of Eternal Torment!"

Naruto: (dying in agony) "At least... I'll get to see my parents in Heaven..."

Hinata's father: "No, you won't. Perverts and molesters like you go straight to Hell!"

Demons rise from beneath the ground to drag Naruto's soul into Hell. The people's cheers and sounds of jubilation drown out his cries for mercy.

Curtain.

-o-

_Leaf General Hospital, ten minutes later..._

"What's wrong with her? Is she going to be all right?" Naruto was near panic. He'd received a fairly solid grounding in first aid along with the rest of the class at the Academy, since while the relevant instructors did all want him dead, sabotaging his ability to save other people's lives was a step too far for any true medic-nin. And knowing as much about medicine as he did made Hinata's completely inexplicable loss of consciousness that much more terrifying.

The doctor, a man of forty or so with a short, neatly-trimmed black beard, looked at him over the top of his glasses. The unmediated gaze of those cold blue eyes made Naruto feel like his soul was being weighed in the balance.

"She will be fine in a few hours, young man," the doctor told Naruto in an even, dispassionate voice. "As far as I can tell, she has merely fainted from excessive sensory stimulation. Now, would you like to tell me what you did to bring about this state of affairs?"

Part of Naruto was going red with embarrassment, while another was going pale with worry at the implications, to the net effect that his complexion did not change.

"I didn't do anything!"

"I see," the doctor held his gaze for a few seconds. "And is that what you are going to tell Lord Hiashi when I inform him that well-known troublemaker Uzumaki Naruto has just hospitalised his beloved daughter?"

Now the paleness was definitely winning out.

"You wouldn't really do that, would you?" Naruto should have been analysing, calculating, looking for a way to take control of the conversation, but somehow none of his higher brain functions were willing to respond.

"I'm afraid it's part of my oath as a doctor to take all steps necessary to ensure the welfare of my patients. And if I can't get you to admit the truth, I'm sure Lord Hiashi will."

"Look, we were sparring and we sort of fell over and our lips touched each other's and she fainted! It was a complete accident! She'll tell you as much when she comes to! And anyway, if I was some sort of molester, would I bring her to the hospital?"

The doctor considered this.

"And I'm a fricking ninja! If I'd done something wrong, I would at least have come in disguise!"

The doctor said nothing.

"Look, I'm not disguised at all!" Naruto shouted desperately. "I'll prove it!"

He promptly punched himself in the face.

The startled doctor did note the lack of a transformation technique being dispelled.

"Please don't call her family!" Naruto all but begged.

The doctor stroked his beard with a glint of amusement in his eye. "Ahh, the pieces begin to fall into place. I'll tell you what. I'll leave the matter to Lady Hinata's discretion. She can inform Lord Hiashi herself if she so chooses."

"Oh, thank you!" Naruto was immensely relieved. The immediate crisis averted, his brain belatedly started working again, and a thought occurred to him. "May I stay here until she wakes up? Even though it was an accident, I sort of feel responsible."

The doctor thought about it for a second, then nodded. Subtly inclining his head to indicate an end to the interaction, he left the room and returned to his work.

"Perhaps the boy is not so bad after all," he chuckled to himself as he started to settle back into his daily routine. "Still, of all the people she could have gone for..."

-o-

Naruto sat down next to Hinata's bed and looked at her. He'd somehow never noticed before how ridiculously cute she looked (though, then again, he'd never seen her asleep). Had this always been the case, or had she changed recently?

The silence was a peaceful one as he watched Hinata's sleeping form, pondering her taijutsu abilities and where he could take her training from here. It would also help if he could figure out what had made her faint, and how to stop it happening again, but quite frankly he didn't even have a clue where to begin. After all, people's lips touching wasn't a big deal unless it was a kiss. Wait, that _hadn't _been a kiss, right? No way. That definitely had not been his first kiss, or hers, it didn't count, and the explanation had to be something completely different.

As he pondered, he noticed Hinata start to mutter something quietly. Naruto politely ignored her, but then he caught his own name.

"Oh, yes, please, Naruto..."

His eyes went wide. That couldn't be right. No, absolutely not, she was probably just dreaming about him offering her tea or something. Yeah, that had to be it. No matter what it sounded like. Or how much supporting evidence he was steadily accumulating.

And anyway, no girl had ever liked him. Well, Sakura used to be nice to him, once upon a time, back before she fell for Sasuke and her personality did a 180. He'd never forgotten that she'd been one of the first people in his life to treat him with kindness, but the flames of that passion cooled with every passing day as he watched her grow up more and more two-faced, sickly-sweet to those she liked and angry and violent to those she didn't. These days, half the reason he asked her out was because of how incredibly effective it was at reinforcing his image as an idiot.

"Oh, Naruto..."

That was it. He couldn't stay here a second longer. Naruto wrote Hinata a quick note to explain what she was doing in a hospital bed, and practically ran for the exit.

-o-

"Gentlemen," Naruto exclaimed back in the safety of his own flat, after being restored by the calming power of cup ramen, "this state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue."

He paced back and forth before the rows of chairs, the clones sitting on them watching him attentively. Since he didn't actually own that many chairs, most of them were clones as well.

"Now, I will be taking any suggestions on how to resolve the situation. Yes, Naruto Number Five?"

"Sir!" the clone raised his arm. "We could infiltrate the Hyūga clan compound and attempt to seize strategic intelligence assets, which is to say her diary."

"Rejected!" Naruto Prime snapped. "Can you imagine her reaction if she found out we'd read it? She would hate us forever. And besides, the Hyūga would slaughter us if they caught us."

"Sir!"

"Yes, Naruto Number Twelve?"

"We could ask her straight out if she likes us," the clone suggested.

"Are you mad, private?! Do you have any idea how awkward things would get if it turned out we'd got the wrong end of the stick?! It could jeopardise her training!"

"Hey, how come I have to be a private?" Naruto Number Twelve demanded petulantly.

"Have you completed any missions that have furthered the cause of the Worldwide Uzumaki Naruto Coalition?"

"Well, no, sir. You just created me five minutes ago."

"Exactly. Now shut up."

Naruto Prime turned back to the whiteboard, which had a rather badly drawn picture of Hinata next to a list of facts and objectives written in exaggeratedly bright colours. Naruto had discovered to his delight that, whereas merely touching normal clones was enough to dispel them under any and all circumstances, writing on a shadow clone disguised as a whiteboard did not automatically cross the damage threshold. He looked forward to experimenting with the implications as soon as the present crisis was dealt with.

"Sir!"

"Yes, Naruto Number Three?"

"What if we..."

The clone outlined a very cunning plan indeed. As other clones offered input, pointed out flaws and suggested refinements, Naruto Prime's grin grew ever wider.

-o-

"Hey, where's Sasuke?" Kiba asked. "Didn't you invite everyone to the public baths?"

"Eh, he'll turn up. Or maybe he thinks he's too cool to come." Naruto shrugged.

He carefully scoped out the area. Shikamaru and Chōji were relaxing in the hot bath. Chōji was apparently oblivious to the world, while Shikamaru was idly poking at some stray bubbles.

Kiba and Shino were still washing, and Sasuke was nowhere to be seen. And as far as he knew, Hinata, Sakura and Ino were in the girls' section on the far side of the dividing wall (which, while tall, did not reach all the way to the ceiling for reasons of air circulation). The time had come.

Outside the entrance to the baths, a man leaning against the wall felt his headband suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke. He nodded to the woman next to him, and they walked inside.

Once next to the entrance to the women's half, they suddenly erupted into a loud shouting match.

"But Yumi, can't you see I love you?"

"Don't lie to me, Hitachi! I saw you last night with that floozy Kihara! If you really cared about our baby..."

"You mean the baby you had with that ANBU assassin? He told me all the sordid details, Yumi! What would your pacifist brother say if he could see you now?"

"You leave Sōichirō out of this!"

Pretty much everyone turned to listen to the soap opera as it continued.

Naruto walked nonchalantly up to the far corner of the dividing wall, opposite the entrance, looked around to make sure no-one was watching, and then put his fingers together.

"Multiple Shadow Clone Technique!"

In a matter of seconds, a stack of shadow clones reached the top of the wall. The one at the top then proceeded to create more shadow clones, each pre-transformed into a slim cushion. As they fell into the corner on the far side, the very last shadow clone to be created, on top of the stack of cushions, was pre-transformed into a standard-issue small wooden bucket.

As it fell, it hit each cushion in turn, making them vanish but slightly softening the impact, so that the bucket finally landed in the corner without making a sound.

A few seconds later, the couple at the entrance stopped shouting at each other and walked outside. Once safely out of sight, they vanished in puffs of smoke.

Shadow Clone Naruto, safely concealed in bucket form, was now in position to listen to the three girls talk about boys. He knew from manga, his sole source of information about romance, that this was what invariably occurred when girls were in baths or hot springs together. The minimal height of the bucket meant all he could see was the girls' heads, but this more than sufficed for his purposes.

With the soap opera couple gone, the girls' conversation resumed.

"Um, Sakura, Ino..." Hinata said quietly and rather timidly (again Naruto wondered, had she always been this cute?). "Can I ask you something?"

The girls turned to her. "Sure, Hinata," Ino replied.

"How do you know if you like a boy?"

Jackpot! Naruto was cheering in his head at the combination of his sheer awesomeness and his incredible luck. It had occurred to him (or, more specifically, to Naruto Number Four) in the process of composing the plan that perhaps there were some areas where manga wasn't 100% trustworthy as a guide to how life worked, but now he felt guilty for ever doubting his truest ally.

Sakura decided to field this one. "How, huh? Well, your heart beats faster when you look at him, and you want to spend all your time with him, and you feel like you're the only person who realises how amazing he really is, and you really want him to notice you..."

"Oh, come _on_, Sakura," Ino interrupted. "Quit filling her head with that soppy crap."

She turned to Hinata. "Navel-gazing is a really dumb way to do romance. You think you might like a guy? Go talk to him. Invite him out to do stuff. Maybe ask him on a date. And then if you decide he's fun to be around, it'll be easy to figure out the rest from there."

"Oh, what do _you_ know?" Sakura demanded. "You're just stupid and insensitive! You could never understand a normal girl's feelings!"

"Oh, yeah?!" Ino snapped back. "I'm not the one who's spent all this time twiddling her thumbs _on the same damn team_ as the guy she likes. If _I _had this much time with Sasuke every day, I'd have him eating out of my hand by now!"

"If you had this much time with Sasuke every day, he'd realise what a thick-skinned pig you are and dump you in a flash! He doesn't need a dumb tomboy like you!"

"Um... Sakura, Ino... please don't fight..." Hinata attempted to interject.

"Oh, but he needs an over-sensitive drama queen who couldn't fight her way out of a paper bag?" Ino countered, ignoring or possibly just not hearing Hinata. "Oh, save me, Sasuke, I'm so girly and helpless!"

"What was that? You think you're a better ninja than me now? Did you forget who kicked your ass in the last three throwing exams? Let me remind you!"

Sakura grabbed a nearby bucket (fortunately, she was on the other side of the bath from Naruto) and threw it at Ino shuriken-style.

The bath, however, was pretty big, and Ino had all the time she needed to duck out of the way. "Oh, it's that how it's gonna be?!"

She jumped out and leaped backwards towards the washing benches, where there was a stack of other such buckets. "Here I come!"

Fortunately, there were no other customers in the women's section of the baths, and Hinata sensibly moved to the furthest possible corner from Sakura, so there was no-one to get hurt in the crossfire as buckets flew back and forth, sometimes striking each other mid-air, but generally missing their targets before being returned at even higher speed.

Naruto wasn't too worried. He'd considered the possibility of being struck by a sudden impact and having his disguise dispelled - this was one of the reasons he'd decided to use a shadow clone. A blow that accidentally got rid of the disguise would also dispel the clone at the same time, especially if it was putting the minimum amount of effort into maintaining itself, which it was.

This is why he was busy pondering whether to wait and see if the conversation resumed once Sakura and Ino ran out of steam, or to cut his losses and disappear in the chaos, when one of Ino's buckets hit the corner of the bath, ricocheted against the wall, bounced back and forth several times, and tapped him very very gently with the last of its momentum.

By a thousand-to-one chance, this was exactly enough to dispel the Transformation Technique while leaving the clone unharmed. A naked Naruto now stood in the corner of the women's baths.

"Urk."

"Naruto? What are you doing here?" Hinata asked, puzzled.

Naruto was stunned to realise that, while she technically didn't need to because she was entirely submerged and the angle was all wrong anyway, Hinata was making no move whatsoever to cover herself up.

"Whoa," the Naruto clone thought. "That has to mean she likes me. She actually genuinely likes me. It's the only logical conclusion. I mean, if it was Sakura, she'd have punched me through the ceiling for seeing her naked by now. Wait... where _is _Sakura?"

"Secret Kunoichi Art: Shatter the Spheres!"

On the other side of the dividing wall, Naruto collapsed in agony as the destroyed shadow clone's experiences came back to him.

As soon as he could move again, he jumped up, ignoring the other boys' odd looks, and ran for the changing rooms. He had to escape at any cost! Aware of the danger awaiting him, he was even prepared to use some of his secret techniques, but the incredible pain still running through his body made it impossible to concentrate enough to manipulate chakra.

Unfortunately, his time spent lying on the floor in the foetal position had given the girls the opportunity to get changed and move to intercept.

"Gwerk!" Naruto choked as his momentum was arrested by Ino's hand around his throat.

"Uh, can we... talk about... this?" he managed to force out.

"Oh, we will," Sakura smiled sweetly. "Afterwards."

-o-

The doctor had refused to give Naruto an estimate of how long it would take him to recover, which was never a good sign in his book. He lay back in the hospital bed, staring at the ceiling while alternately pondering Hinata's reaction and reflecting on what his plan had taught him about infiltration. Next time, he decided, he had to be more careful. He did not enjoy being trapped in a hospital bed feeling like a packet of crisps after five minutes with Chōji. About the only thing he had to be grateful for was that he had a private room - presumably because no patient would be prepared to stay in the same room as the loathsome Nine-Brained Demon Fox.

After some time, the door opened. Sakura and Ino walked in.

"Um... we're sorry. We may have gone a bit overboard." Sakura and Ino bowed together, just shallowly enough Naruto couldn't be sure if they were genuinely repentant or just making fun of him.

"I think you broke my everything."

"I hope you learned your lesson, Naruto," Sakura admonished.

"I definitely have," Naruto said in a voice of the purest sincerity. The lesson, of course, was to always have more than one backup plan.

"Oh, just wondering," Ino went on in a suspiciously casual voice, "which one of us were you trying to peep on?"

Naruto thought about this for a second. "Is there any answer to this that won't make one or both of you really angry with me all over again?"

The girls exchanged glances.

"I told you he was smarter than he looked," Ino told Sakura.

"But now we can't settle our bet," Sakura complained.

"Uh... the doctor said I need lots of peace and quiet... so..." Naruto lied.

"All right. See you later."

The girls left before his fragile body could be put in any more danger.

-o-

"Hey, loser."

Sasuke walked in through the door without waiting for an invitation, a heavy bag in his right hand.

"What's up, moron?" Naruto gave the reply demanded by shinobi etiquette.

"I didn't want you to lose the pathetic little skill you have while you're stuck in here, so I checked out a few books from the library for you. Not that I expect you to be able to read, but you can at least have fun looking at the pictures." Sasuke dumped the stack of books on Naruto's bedside table.

"Uh... thanks?"

Sasuke shrugged. "You're not much of a challenge, but I wouldn't want you to get even worse. See you, loser."

And with that, he left.

Naruto looked through the books with his more usable hand. _Master Wu's Compendium of Fire Country Taijutsu. Meditation Exercises for the Chakra-Deficient. E-Rank Ninjutsu and You. Raiden Steelweaver and the Country of Zombies._ And a few others.

Naruto grinned and began to read.

-o-

Someone knocked on the door.

Naruto put his book down. "Come in!"

Hinata entered.

"Um, hi, Naruto. How are you feeling?"

"Not that bad, surprisingly," Naruto smiled. "I'm even getting the feeling in my legs back, although part of me wishes I weren't."

"Oh, that's terrible!"

"Don't worry about it." The important thing, as far as Naruto was concerned, was that he'd probably make a full recovery. He'd healed from worse injuries than these before, though admittedly those had only come one or two at a time. And thanks to industrial doses of painkillers, he was merely suspended over a vast yawning abyss of agony rather than actually plummeting into its infinite depths. If he'd been on civilian analgesics rather than shinobi ones, he probably wouldn't even be conscious right now, but the latter were designed to allow debriefing of shinobi who had sustained major injuries in the course of obtaining urgently-needed information, and were doing a stellar job of keeping him lucid.

"Is there anything you need? I could go get you books. Oh, you already have books. What about food? Or... or a pen and paper? Anything at all."

Naruto thought about this. "Thanks, Hinata. How about a shogi board? Then you and I can have a game. If you want to, I mean."

"Thanks to you coming round so much," he added, "I realised how boring playing with myself all the time really was."

There was an awkward silence at this.

"With clones! I meant playing with my clones!"

Hinata giggled. "Sure, I can get us a board."

"By the way, what were you doing in the girls' section of the public baths?" she asked.

"Um." Naruto's mind flashed back to their interaction. "Can we put that on the 'for another time' list?"

"Sure," she nodded. "I'm very sorry Ino and Sakura hurt you like that." She was also sorry she hadn't tried to stop them, but it hadn't even occurred to her that they would react so violently until it was too late.

Naruto winced. "Yeah, well. I'm just glad _you_ didn't. I don't think I could handle being beaten up by someone who was actually good at taijutsu on top of all that."

Hinata frowned in confusion. "Why would I?"

Naruto gave her a puzzled look. "Why wouldn't you?"

After considering this question for a few seconds, Hinata went "oh!"

"What is it?"

"I keep forgetting," she elaborated. "Being seen naked by a boy is supposed to be a big deal, right?"

Naruto nodded, still puzzled. "Of course it is."

"How to explain..." she pondered. Her expression of concentration was apparently cute too. Naruto started to wonder how he'd never noticed all these things before.

"Do you know how the Byakugan works, Naruto?"

"I know it lets you see through solid objects and see people's chakra, and I know it gives you a wider visual range than normal eyesight."

Hinata nodded. "There's only so much I'm allowed to talk about with a non-Hyūga, but basically it gives you 360 degree vision when it's on, over a very large area. You still focus on some parts, but you end up seeing everything in a sort of peripheral vision. It's complicated to explain."

"Right," Naruto nodded.

"Think about it."

"... oh."

"Exactly. When you live in the Hyūga compound, you get used at a very young age to the idea that there's no such thing as privacy, at least where vision's concerned. No matter what you're doing, there could be someone out there who's seeing it, down to what your chakra is doing inside you at the time, whether they want to or not. So you never learn to be embarrassed at what you see, or at what other people see."

"And that's why you didn't cover up when you saw me looking at you."

"Yes."

"Oh." Maybe he'd been wrong about Hinata liking him after all. It made sense, of course. He shouldn't have got his hopes up in the first place.

"Um... did I say something wrong?" Hinata asked, suddenly looking worried.

"No, not at all," Naruto forced himself to smile. "Uh, it's pretty late, and I'm feeling kind of tired, so would you mind if we called it a night?"

"Sure," Hinata nodded, not entirely convinced. "Sleep well."

And with that, she walked out, closing the door very softly after herself.

-o-

The next morning, Naruto got another visitor. Iruka came in with a worried expression and a truly enormous bag of fruit.

"I'm sorry it took me so long to come visit, Naruto. I only heard about what happened to you this morning."

"Oh, that's OK, Iruka-sensei. I'm just glad you came." Naruto meant it. No matter what else happened in his life, Iruka-sensei was a rock-solid pillar of stability, a guaranteed source of affection, sympathy, and occasional ramen. He was the one person Naruto hated himself a little for deceiving.

"Now, I do have to tell you," Iruka's voice turned stern, "that peeping on girls in the bath is unethical and ungentlemanly, and I hope you realise that what you did was very wrong."

Naruto nodded automatically.

"Good. I've brought you some healthy fruit and vegetables - make sure you eat them all so you recover faster. And do everything the doctors and nurses tell you to. They've got your best interests at heart."

Naruto nodded again.

"I'm sorry I can't stay, but class starts in half an hour. I'll try to come by when I can."

"Thank you," Naruto told him.

As Iruka headed towards the door, Naruto called after him.

"Iruka-sensei, did _you _peep on girls in the bath when you were young?"

Iruka went a bit red. "No, and it was wrong then, too!"

And he rushed out.

-o-

The next visitors, to Naruto's surprise, were Kiba (with Akamaru, who had presumably snuck onto the premises using canine ninja skills) and Shino. Kiba shoved the door open with an abundance of energy; Shino closed it carefully behind them.

"Hey, Naruto. How're you doing?"

Naruto waved. "Not that bad. I think my spleen's no longer inside out. How about you?"

"I'm fine. Thanks for inviting us out yesterday. It was good to unwind."

"Thank you for thinking of me," Shino added in his usual strangely earnest voice.

"Man, I can't believe you got beaten up by Ino and Sakura of all people," Kiba laughed.

"Hey, they got the first strike. I wasn't exactly in top form after the Kunoichi Special, know what I mean?"

Kiba winced and Shino shuddered.

"Anyway, listen, we've got something serious to talk about."

"What's that?" Naruto asked.

"I've been smelling your scent all over Hinata lately. Now, I don't mind, and frankly she's seemed happier the last couple of months than I ever remember seeing her before, but just remember this:"

Naruto swallowed.

"If you hurt her, in any way, they will never find your body," Kiba told him, looking him straight in the eye.

"Why?" Shino added, "Because I will feed it to my insects."

"Way to ruin a great threat, genius!" Kiba snapped.

"On the contrary, I believe mine was more original and had greater impact," Shino retorted.

"Anyway," Kiba turned back to Naruto. "We've got a mission coming up, so we should go. We've been preparing for this one - that damn cat won't know what hit it. Right, Akamaru?"

"Woof!"

"We will return at another time," Shino said.

As they walked out, Naruto could hear them bickering over the best way to threaten someone.

-o-

"Oh, hi, Kakashi-sensei."

"Good afternoon, Naruto. How are you feeling?"

"All right. How are you?"

"Glad to hear it," Kakashi replied. "Now I should tell you that I'm very disappointed in your behaviour yesterday. It was conduct entirely unbecoming of a Genin under my tutelage."

"I'm sorry, Kakashi-sensei," Naruto said.

Kakashi nodded sternly, then continued his rebuke in a softer voice. "What possessed you to position yourself right next to the bath? If you wanted to peep on them from a secure location, why not transform into a ceiling light, or a wall fixture at a safe distance?"

Naruto's jaw dropped.

"You still have much to learn, Naruto. But don't give up. I believe in your potential," Kakashi added at normal volume.

"Also, there's some very simple training you can do to mute the pain from injuries to your shadow clones. Remind me to show you once you're back on your feet."

"I'll check in on you in a few days. Get well soon."

-o-

Naruto was feeling a lot better by the time Hinata came by in the early evening. Not only were his injuries considerably less painful than before, but Chōji and Shikamaru had dropped by with some sweets and manga for him. He didn't really know Shikamaru, and had a feeling the bored-looking boy would just as soon have stayed home, but the fact that he'd come anyway was appreciated.

Naruto had spent some time pondering the mysterious and conflicting evidence regarding Hinata after his eyes got too tired for reading. On the one hand, she was happy to spend lots of time around him, far more than anyone else he knew. She apparently had dreams about him. She had an almost scarily high opinion of him (Naruto _was_ pretty awesome, but having other people acknowledge this was an utterly alien experience). On the other hand, in all the time they'd known each other, she'd never said or done anything obviously romantic. She certainly didn't behave _anything_ like Sakura or Ino, his only real-life references for girls in love. She didn't even seem put out by the knowledge that he regularly asked another girl out (admittedly with zero success). The whole thing was utterly confusing, and he couldn't even ask anyone for advice without risking giving away too much. In the end, Naruto decided that his best option was just to try and forget about it until such time as new information came in.

"So," he smiled at Hinata, "ready to resume your training?"

"Yes, Naruto-sensei!"

He did a double-take.

"Say that again."

"Yes, Naruto-sensei?" Hinata repeated questioningly.

"Wow. That sounds even better than I thought. No wonder so many people become ninja instructors."

Hinata smiled. "Shall we play?"

"Sure!"

Naruto's concentration wasn't at its peak thanks to his injuries, and his mind wandered somewhat more than usual. As a result, there was a lot more small talk with Hinata than he was used to. He noticed that she still carefully avoided any mention of her home life, but they did share a lot of laughs over the shared suffering of D-rank missions. Apparently the Team Eight experience involved a lot of Kiba trying to bait Shino, and Shino being stoic and serious and strait-laced and generally exactly the kind of person who drove Kiba crazy. Captain Kurenai sensibly adopted a hands-off policy when it came to this sort of thing, which left Hinata trying to refocus the boys' attentions on the task at hand whenever Kiba started to mess around and Shino started to get lost in thought. Naruto felt a nice warm glow when Hinata told him that the training, despite the lack of easily quantifiable progress, was already making her more confident when dealing with her teammates. It hadn't occurred to him that sustained commitment to moving in the right direction would in itself make such a difference to her mental state.

When Hinata left, Naruto made some notes (using the pen and paper she'd brought him even though he'd forgotten to ask for it), and then found himself looking thoughtfully at the enormous stack of books, manga and fruit on his bedside table. It seemed strange how here he was, in hospital with a broken everything (he'd asked one of the nurses, and she secretly admitted that this _was_ an unofficial diagnosis where ninja were concerned), and he was still feeling happier than he thought he'd ever felt before.


	5. Chapter 4

_A/N: This is the second of two simultaneously uploaded chapters. Please be sure to read the other one first._

_15/06/13 - amended to reflect the lack of colours in shogi.  
_

-o-

"Aha! You just fell into my cunning trap!" Naruto proclaimed, dramatically picking up a captured shogi piece. "Bid your knight farewell. He serves a darker power now."

"Um... actually, Naruto, I was rather hoping you'd do that..."

Naruto and Hinata were so engrossed in their latest game that they barely registered the door opening, or the doctor walking in, looking up only when the man gave a polite cough.

To Naruto's horror, it was the black-bearded man from before. To Naruto's even greater horror, Hinata looked up, exclaimed "Uncle Saburō!", and proceeded to run over and hug him with no regard for the very fundamental principles of public decency, or the fact that Naruto had been just about to reveal his devastating counter-counter-trap which would shatter Hinata's offensive strategy to smithereens and usher in a thousand years of darkness. (Somewhere in his head, this game was being recast as the Demi-Fiend's epic rebellion against the corrupt angelic forces of light; look forward to the thrilling conclusion in Volume 25!).

"It's good to see you too, Lady Hinata," the man smiled. "I trust you are well?"

"Yes, thank you. And you?"

"I'm managing," the doctor replied. "Now if you don't mind, I need to speak to the young man in private."

Hinata nodded and left the room.

"I see my first impression of you was correct," the doctor told Naruto as soon as Hinata closed the door. "Already peeping on girls in the public baths at your age? You truly are a criminal through and through." He shook his head in disapproval.

"It was all a misunderstanding!" Naruto once again insisted. Well, it _was_. He'd been there on an intelligence-gathering mission, not because the sight of naked girls was somehow inherently worth the risk of grievous bodily harm.

"Hmm... I see," the doctor nodded. "And the fact that Lady Hinata happened to be there at the time was surely a complete coincidence."

Naruto made himself nod, on shakier ground now. Despite his best efforts, he was completely unable to read the man, and had a horrible feeling that he was in the middle of playing a game for which he did not know the rules.

"I have been terribly remiss in my manners," the doctor suddenly announced. "My name is Kurogane Saburō. I am a senior physician here at the hospital. Normally, I invest some effort into getting to know people I expect to be frequent patients, but things have been very busy lately."

Naruto was about to query the "frequent patients" comment, but Kurogane went on.

"Yes, very busy. Tell me, are you familiar with Spontaneous Chakra Combustion Disease?"

Naruto shook his head.

"Pray that you never have to be, young man. We're going to have to remodel an entire ward."

Naruto nodded mutely. He was trying very hard not to imagine what Spontaneous Chakra Combustion Disease might be like, and not entirely succeeding.

"But that's by the by. Since we're getting to know each other, allow me to share some entirely unrelated items of trivia with you." Kurogane smiled at him in a fashion that should have been friendly but came off more like an alligator watching to see if its prey would shake off its fear paralysis and try to flee. "Did you know that, statistically speaking, a given shinobi will end up in our hospital at least three times a year, with much higher rates for Genin and certain kinds of Bloodline Limit user?"

"No, I didn't," Naruto responded uneasily. There had to be a pattern to this man's behaviour, something that would give him a clue as to his intentions and what to do about them, but in spite of Naruto's best efforts his mind remained resolutely blank.

"Just an interesting statistic," Kurogane said. "Another curious fact of medicine is that doctors have notoriously bad handwriting - ironic given how essential precision is in our profession. As it happens, there is even an urban legend of a doctor who, presumably while highly stressed, accidentally wrote _proscribed_ rather than _prescribed_ when making notes on a certain ninja's ability to receive anaesthesia and painkillers. As a result of just a single letter's difference, the patient in question was forced to endure every single injury, disease and operation with full consciousness and sensation."

He paused to allow this idea to sink in.

"Some versions of the story say he went insane and took his own life, while others merely claim he retired from the ninja profession and lived out a more-or-less fulfilling life as a waste disposal technician."

"I- I see," Naruto said, endeavouring to keep his voice steady. He'd never before had cause to so intensely regret the power of his imagination.

"But as I say, that's nothing but an urban myth. No-one has ever found any medical records matching such a description. Now, for a third piece of trivia, let me tell you a random fact about myself." Kurogane gave a pleasant smile.

"Some years ago, I served as an assistant to the Hyūga Clan's private physician, a role which caused me to spend a great deal of time at the Hyūga compound, and to get to know its inhabitants. You could say I've watched Lady Hinata grow up ever since she was a little girl. And embarrassing though it is to admit, the thought of her coming to any sort of harm, or being mistreated in any way, causes me to feel very stressed indeed, to the point where my hands start to tremble in the middle of my work."

Kurogane looked down at Naruto. "I hope you feel a stronger bond between us after this little talk. I understand my bedside manner may be considered a little... unconventional, but I've never had any complaints."

Naruto could do nothing but nod.

"On an entirely unrelated note, I am pleased and - somewhat shocked - to inform you that you have been cleared to leave the hospital as early as tomorrow. Congratulations on having the most powerful regenerative ability I've ever seen outside a Bloodline Limit. Since you are inexplicably in a fit state to resume ninja missions, your captain has, of course, already been informed."

Kurogane inclined his head in farewell and walked out of the room before Naruto could recover the power of speech.

-o-

"Naruto, are you... OK?"

Naruto forced himself to nod. "Yeah, I'm fine." Apparently, he was now officially one slip-up away from being erased by the ever-growing Hinata Protection Squad, but he suspected that telling her this would be a bad move.

"Uncle Saburō didn't have bad news, did he?" Hinata looked at him worriedly.

"No, no, not at all. Actually, he said I was free to go tomorrow."

Hinata beamed. "Really? That's wonderful!"

Then she frowned. "But... didn't Sakura and Ino break most of the bones in your body? I saw one of the charts the nurses were carrying, with a list of fractures, and they had three extra sheets attached with a paperclip. I thought you'd be here for months."

Naruto shrugged. "I heal fast. It's a thing that happens sometimes with rare types of chakra." This was technically true. After noticing how incredibly fast he healed, Naruto had done some research (involving sneaking into various public libraries, and in one case a hospital, after closing hours). For a while, he even thought he'd found his father - some guy named Yakushi who was on record as having incredible regenerative powers since childhood - but it turned out the dates didn't match up. Naruto doubted he'd been fathered by a seven-year old. In the end, he'd found enough differences between his natural healing and how chakra-based regeneration normally worked to conclude that the Nine-Brains must be habitually applying its inhuman powers of chakra control to repair his body. This was not a fact he intended to share with Hinata or anyone else.

However, Hinata didn't look convinced by the explanation, so Naruto quickly looked for an excuse to change the subject. "Hey, I know! Since I'm getting out of here tomorrow, how about I take you out for a meal tomorrow night to say thanks for coming to visit me every day?"

Hinata froze. "Me? For a meal?"

"Yeah. I know this great ramen place, and they even give me a discount for being a regular. You'll love it."

"You mean... just the two of us? Going for dinner?" Hinata asked as if making sure she hadn't misheard.

"Well, yeah. I mean, we can invite some of the others along if you like, but I was thinking-"

"No!" Hinata interrupted with the urgency of a tranquiliser dart striking a tiger in mid-pounce. "I mean... that's OK. I'd like to... go for dinner with just you."

"Great. Now I believe we had a game of shogi to finish."

Unfortunately, Hinata's concentration was clearly flagging this late in the evening, as she visibly struggled to keep her mind on the game, and made several obvious mistakes. Presumably this was also why, instead of opting for a rematch, she rushed off as soon as the game was over, pausing only to agree a time and place to meet the next day.

-o-

It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining, birds were singing, somewhere in the distance an irate old man was yelling at some kids for using his garden fence for shuriken practice, and even being intercepted by the rest of Team Seven before he could go home and finally have a meal that wasn't hospital food couldn't dispel Naruto's good mood.

"Hi, everyone. What are you guys doing here?"

"We've got good news for you, Naruto," Kakashi-sensei announced. "After he heard you were cleared to get back to doing missions today, Sasuke managed to wrangle a C-rank mission out of the Hokage to celebrate."

"That's not what happened!" Sasuke quickly interjected. "I was just getting bored of D-rank missions, and I figured since Mummy Man here was getting his bandages removed, we'd finally have the numbers to do something more interesting."

"A C-rank?" Naruto's eyes shone. "You mean something with a real challenge? And real pay?"

"Yep," Kakashi nodded. "Drop by your house to pick up your gear, then meet us and the client at the main gate. We set off in an hour."

"An hour?! What, don't I get any time to recover?"

"I'm afraid not," Kakashi told him. "This mission is time-sensitive. We do it now, or we hand it over to another team and go back to D-rank work for a while. But don't worry - Kurogane-sensei said that, in his professional opinion, your odds of mission survival are as good as the next man's."

Naruto fervently hoped that the next man hadn't been one of the victims of Spontaneous Chakra Combustion Disease. Still, he did feel pretty good, especially for someone who'd apparently done months' worth of healing in little over a week. He ran home at top speed, revelling in his regained mobility while simultaneously dispatching a shadow clone to find Hinata and inform her of the change in plans. It was no big deal, after all - they could just have dinner after he came back from the mission.

-o-

"So what's the mission?" Naruto asked Kakashi, looking around the gate area but seeing nothing except a pair of luckless Chūnin stuck on guard duty, a farmer wrestling with an apathetic donkey hitched to a cart, and a drunken homeless man with a ridiculous hat sitting in the shade of the gate - in other words, nothing that resembled a client.

"Escort and protection," Kakashi replied. "We're to escort the engineer Tazuna back to the Country of the Wave, and then stand guard against bandits and the like while his team finishes building a bridge. Apparently, they've been having a lot of trouble with banditry - I don't even know when I last heard of any traders coming out of Wave."

"This'll be your first time leaving the Fire Country," he added, "but don't worry. You shouldn't expect to face anything beyond your abilities. A well-trained Genin is easily worth a dozen bandits."

"So Naruto here must be worth at least two, then," Sasuke commented.

"Might not matter," Naruto struck back. "If it comes to a fight, I might end up fighting you instead of them. Bandits are all supposed to be butt-ugly, dressed in rags and stink like rotting fish, so how am I supposed to tell the difference?"

His Wrath-of-Sakura sense suddenly tingling, he quickly looked for a way to divert her attention. "So, Kakashi-sensei, where is this Tazuna, anyway?"

The stratagem worked. "Oh, yeah," Sakura asked, "where _is _he? Don't tell me he comes from the Hatake School of Punctuality."

Kakashi pointed to the drunken homeless-looking man. "That would be him. Remember, he's paying our fees, so treat him with respect."

Tazuna staggered into an upright position, a gourd of saké in one hand. "What? You're finally here? Great. So where's your ninja team?"

Kakashi nodded his head respectfully. "This is it." He pointed to each member in turn. "Meet Sakura, Sasuke and Naruto. They are extremely capable ninja with the finest combat training."

Tazuna's eyes widened. "Excuse me? This little bunch of runts is going to be all that stands between me and certain death? How about I cancel this mission right now and go take my business to Hidden Mist?"

In a flash, Sasuke was behind him, a kunai at his throat. "You would be wise not to underestimate us, old man."

Kakashi resisted the urge to facepalm. "Sasuke, don't antagonise the client. Master Tazuna, please don't make assumptions based on their age."

Sasuke reluctantly withdrew the kunai and returned to the rest of the team.

Kakashi turned back to Tazuna. "Our Genin are as strong as those of any other village, and more than sufficient for your needs. I assure you that you won't get any higher ranks of ninja for the fees you're willing to pay."

Tazuna seemed mollified. "All right. Guess I'll just have to make the best of it. Let's go, runts."

-o-

A good start, Naruto decided, would be to pump the client for information - and get all the mission info he'd missed out on straight from the horse's mouth.

"Hey, old man. What's up with this bridge you're building? Why would bandits care about some piddly little bridge?"

"You bite your tongue, runt!" Tazuna glared at him. "My bridge is going to be a miracle of engineering that revitalises the Wave economy in ways you can't imagine! It'll be the end of... the bandits' domination of our country's trade routes. It'll single-handedly put the Country of the Wave back on the map!"

"What's so awesome about Wave, then?" Naruto innocently asked.

"Hah!" Tazuna barked. "What's so awesome about Wave, he says. In the old days, our fish went to the table of every nobleman on the continent. Your Fire Country nobles would pay a mint for top-quality saltwater fish - I guess living in the middle of a forest all your life will do that to you. And the rest! Pearls the size of your fist! And in your case, probably your brain, too!"

Naruto scowled at this, but did not interrupt.

"Rare wood the likes of which you can't get anywhere on the mainland! And the landscapes! We could've bought your little village ten times over with the annual income from the tourist industry alone!" Tazuna boasted.

"So what happened?"

Tazuna deflated all at once. "Bandits happened. They cut off all our shipping routes to the mainland, demanded tribute, and drained Wave dry. Just getting out of Wave to hire you people was a nightmare."

He took a big swig from his gourd. "But once the bridge is complete, none of that will matter any more. We'll show... those scum."

Sakura and Sasuke - also assigned to stay close to the client while Kakashi scouted ahead - were now listening as well. Sasuke had drawn one of his kunai, and was playing with it idly as they walked.

"Why won't it matter?" Sasuke asked. "What's to stop the bandits from just seizing the bridge once we leave?"

"Me," Tazuna announced. "I haven't just been hiring the world's most overpriced bodyguards. I've been securing preliminary deals with merchants and mercenaries left, right and centre. The second that bridge is up, the cargo starts moving - everything the bandits haven't managed to steal has been saved up for that day. And the second the first payment gets in, we'll be able to hire enough mercenaries to tide us over until Wave can afford to train and equip its own standing army. Once that's done, no bastard's ever going to take over my home again!"

"Nice plan." Sasuke, at the front of the party, flipped the kunai in mid-air a few times, then spun it high into the air over his head and turned towards the others, his back to the road, to catch it. As it fell, he put his hands out in front of his chest, and quickly made the hand signals for "don't react", "ambush ahead" and "water" before grabbing it out of the air. He turned back around as if nothing had happened.

"Show-off. Anyone can juggle kunai like that. Check _this_ out," Naruto commented, getting out his own kunai and starting to imitate Sasuke, trying to look like a carefree Genin out on his first mission and oblivious to the possibility of danger. At the same time, he scoped out the area. Kakashi-sensei was nowhere to be seen, having gone on ahead to scout. That limited the possibilities to three: either he'd missed it, or he'd left if for them deliberately, as combat practice or as a test, or it had been set up after he'd passed. So there was a good chance that they were dealing with an enemy smart enough to ignore the Jōnin and wait for the more vulnerable targets - or worse, an enemy sneaky enough to bypass him altogether.

OK, where _was _the ambush? "Water"? There _were_ two puddles in the middle of the road up ahead, which was a little odd since the rest of the area so far had been completely dry. Thanks to the lack of windows in his hospital room, he had no idea about recent weather, but he certainly couldn't remember anyone wearing raincoats or carrying umbrellas when visiting him. Besides, he couldn't see anything else out of place, and he didn't think Sasuke could be _that_ much more observant than him.

Glancing back, Sasuke observed that Sakura had also taken out her kunai, and was attempting to spin it in her hand nonchalantly. The team was now armed and ready. While Tazuna unsurprisingly had no idea what was going on, he seemed to have got the general idea of behaving naturally while gradually moving behind Sakura (who was in turn behind Naruto and Sasuke).

"I bet you can't keep up with _this_, Naruto!" Sasuke announced, throwing two kunai up in the air while drawing a third. The kunai traced a high arc, before coming down onto the puddles, one in the middle of each.

Clang!

An armoured, clawed gauntlet suddenly shot up from each puddle, knocking the kunai away. Two ninja in sinister, ragged black outfits, with headbands bearing a crossed-out Mist symbol, rose from the rippling surface of the water. Their stance was low, leaning forward, ready to spring at the target while exposing a minimal surface area to attack, and the strange, grey armoured right arm of the ninja on the left was connected to the similar left arm of the ninja on the right by a rapidly vibrating chain covered with blades. Their remaining hands each held kunai.

Naruto swallowed. It wasn't just that the attackers were ninja rather than mere bandits, or that the scratch marks across their headbands marked them as missing-nin who had abandoned their villages out of disloyalty or fear of punishment for some terrible crime. It wasn't even that their body language suggested extensive combat experience - more like Chūnin than Genin. It was the fact that the peculiar weapon they wielded spoke volumes about their ability. Whip and chain-type ninja tools, never mind _vibrating, bladed_ _ones_, were rare because they made it so easy to hurt oneself far more than the enemy. Only the most skilled fighters could wield them safely - and conversely, their rarity meant that there was very little training on how to combat them.

Naruto had very little time to think. The flexible, extendable chain would double for both attack and defence. It would be most effective against a flanked enemy, and conversely let them perfectly protect each other's flanks. They would be skilled taijutsu users, so those kunai could comfortably protect the outer sides of the formation. They'd aim for the neck, severing the head quickly and moving on to the next target while maintaining momentum - getting the chain stuck in the torso would leave them too vulnerable, and they'd want to stay on the offensive because the chain made a cumbersome blocking tool if their enemies got a chance to counter.

His team was nowhere near equipped to fight these guys toe-to-toe. That meant he only had one chance to get things right, and it would take flawless tactics calculated to within a tiny fraction of a second.

Naruto charged the enemy ninja, waving his kunai wildly and screaming an incoherent battle cry.

They sprang into motion. They were as good as he'd expected - they must have been using some kind of chakra ability, because they were literally flying forwards, their feet staying in the air as if they'd pushed off the ground harder than physically possible. With the chain stretched out, they left Naruto and Sasuke with an impossible choice: take the attack head-on, likely instantly sealing their fates, or dive to the side, leaving a clear path to Sakura and Tazuna.

Naruto took a third option: he slipped in mid-charge.

Sliding forwards, screaming helplessly, his body nearly horizontal and his arms stretched out behind him, he watched the chain pass above him... and grabbed onto the left ninja's boot just as it sailed over his head.

The enemy was no fool, and as soon as he felt himself losing balance, he made a subtle movement with his armoured hand, and the chain disconnected itself from him so as not to pass the shift in momentum on to his partner. The other ninja immediately copied him and the now-useless chain fell away.

However, Sasuke had started moving as soon as Naruto began to fall. He ran _past_ the ninja on the right, taking advantage of the man's suddenly unprotected left flank, with a kunai in a reverse grip in his right hand. With all the speed from both sides, a single slash was enough to open up the man's abdomen.

Sasuke spun around as he passed his target, and smoothly thrust the bloody kunai at the neck of the other ninja as the man was about to spring up from his fall. He stopped it just short of piercing the skin, and the enemy froze in an acknowledgement of surrender.

However, as the right-hand ninja fell, he had the presence of mind for one last kunai throw, going straight for Tazuna...

Only to be deflected by a kunai in Tazuna's hand. There was a popping noise, and Tazuna vanished. Kakashi stood in his place, (probably) smiling.

"Good job, Team Seven. Secure the prisoner while I go get Tazuna from the bushes I Substituted him into. I think we need to have some serious words with our client."

The whole battle had taken perhaps five seconds.

-o-

It was evening, and Takeda's Wayside Inn was host to the most quarrelsome party it had ever seen. A pink-haired girl was accusing a blond boy of "victory by epic pratfall" and calling him the worst excuse for a ninja that had ever lived. A black-haired boy was accusing a white-haired man of putting lives in danger with ridiculous tests. The white-haired man was largely ignoring him and accusing a drunken old man of withholding vital information and attempting to cheat the Hidden Village of Leaf. And no-one was sure what the tied and gagged black-haired man was accusing them all of, but his muffled imprecations were certainly very passionate.

Eventually, things simmered down.

"I'm sorry, Tazuna," Kakashi announced, "but if this Gatō is wealthy enough to hire the Demon Brothers to assassinate you, and you think he has the budget for Jōnin as well, then that pushes this into a high B-rank mission, maybe even an A. If you can't pay, we can't work."

"You're sending me to my death. You do know that?" Tazuna responded.

"I am well aware," Kakashi replied. "I take no pleasure in it. But if we allow our village to be cheated even once, we're threatening the very lifeblood on which its survival depends. You should consider yourself fortunate that we're not even seeking retribution for the unnecessary danger in which you put my team with your lies."

"Damn straight," Naruto added. "If you'd cheat us, I bet you'd cheat all those people you promised trade concessions or whatever instead of money too."

"Hey, you keep your damn mouth- wait a second!" Tazuna's face lit up. "That's it! I know I can't pay you for this mission rank, but I _am_ permitted to offer preferential trading terms. Once this bridge is up, Wave is going to completely rock the international markets. You could make this mission's costs back a thousandfold!"

Kakashi thought about this. "I'm not authorised to make that call. But I can send a messenger back to the Hokage and get an official judgment. Write out your initial offer, and I suggest you make it generous since you started out by dealing in bad faith."

"Kakashi-sensei," Sasuke called out, "how do we know we can trust them? They can easily promise us the Moon now, and then just back out of it once they've got their bridge and their wealth."

"Actually, they can't," Kakashi explained. "They're effectively going to be a new player on the international market. No-one will know them, at least in their new incarnation. They'll need to build their reputation from zero as a trustworthy partner in order to succeed. One word from an established player like Leaf accusing them of reneging on a deal, and they'll find themselves a pariah. No-one will want to risk dealing with them, and their economy will crumble as surely as if Gatō was still in control."

-o-

After Tazuna finished writing out a scroll of incomprehensible business-legalese, and Kakashi dispatched a small dog (apparently a highly-trained ninja summon beast) to carry it back to Leaf along with a request for pickup of the missing-nin prisoner, Naruto took the opportunity to go to Kakashi's room and ask a question that had been bugging him. A question he'd been ridiculously, unspeakably stupid not to ask straight away.

"Say, Kakashi-sensei, how come the Shadow Clone Technique is a forbidden technique, anyway?"

Kakashi put away his book and turned to face him. "Actually, it isn't. Only the Multiple Shadow Clone Technique is forbidden. As for why... hmm, this'll take a bit of explaining."

Naruto nodded. "Please."

"All right. Do you know how shadow clones are different to normal clones?"

Naruto feigned intense thought. "Normal clones pop when you touch them, while shadow clones pop only when they take a solid hit. Normal clones only do what you... what's the word... pro-gram them to do when you make them, while shadow clones think for themselves. And normal clones only take the chakra you put in them when you use the technique, while shadow clones take an equal share of all your chakra. Is that right?"

Kakashi (probably) smiled. "Very good. But there's one more vital difference. When a shadow clone pops, what happens to its chakra?"

"I get it back." Which was weird when you thought about it, for all sorts of reasons, but definitely the case. "Or if I have more shadow clones, it gets shared out between all of us."

"Exactly. I see you've really been paying attention."

Naruto mentally kicked himself. He urgently needed to dumb down before Kakashi-sensei got suspicious, but at the same time he needed to get his answers.

"So," Kakashi continued, "the thing about shadow clones is that it's not just chakra that gets sent back. It's experience too. When one pops, you get some of its pain - as you've learned all too well - but also everything it experienced during its existence. Its memories become your memories."

Naruto tried to keep a neutral expression on his face. He'd already suspected as much, but was unable to answer the two obvious questions it would imply: why didn't everyone learn the shadow clone technique as soon as they could? And why didn't ninja rule the entire known world?

The hard part would be to ask Kakashi-sensei this without further inflaming his suspicions.

"You get its memories? You mean I could've had a clone sit in class at the Academy and do all my learning for me while I went outside and had fun?"

Kakashi nodded. "The Shadow Clone Technique is supposed to be way above Genin level, so an Academy trainee wouldn't know it, but in theory, yes."

"So then I could've had bunch of clones taking all the different classes at once, and graduate before everyone else? While never having to go to the Academy at all?"

Kakashi looked at him closely. "That is where things get tricky. You know how subjects you're familiar with are much easier to study than new ones? Say, how you'd find it a lot easier to read a book about shuriken than a book about the history of the Warring Clans period?"

"Yeah, I think so. Except I probably wouldn't read any of those books anyway. I'd much rather learn by doing!" That was it. Just a few more openings like that, and Naruto would soon make up for lost ground.

Kakashi didn't comment on this. "The reason is that when you learn new things, your brain needs time and energy to process them. And the more unfamiliar the new information, the more time and energy you need."

Naruto nodded. This made sense.

"Now... what happens when you send one of your shadow clones to read a book about taijutsu, and another to read a book about medicine, and a dozen others to read other books, and then dispel them?"

"Your brain will have to work really really hard to deal with all that knowledge at once?"

"Yes. This is less of an issue in combat, because all your clones will be having similar experiences, both to each other and to what you already know. It can also be all right in training, if every clone is doing the same sort of thing. But unless you're very careful, there are plenty of circumstances where the information overload from dispelling a lot of clones at once can knock you out, or even put you in a coma. That's why ninja don't just send their shadow clones to the library and become experts in everything at once."

"Oh. So the Multiple Shadow Clone Technique is forbidden because... um..."

"Come on, Naruto, you're nearly there," Kakashi said in an encouraging voice. There was something profoundly unnatural about the idea of an adult expecting Naruto to work things out - even Iruka-sensei did his best to keep his expectations of Naruto's intelligence "realistic" - and Naruto wasn't sure how to deal with it.

"... because the more clones you have, the easier it is to push your brain too far?"

"Exactly. Never forget this. If I'd known this sort of warning wasn't in the original scroll, I'd have told you much sooner," Kakashi stated in a serious voice.

Naruto shivered. He'd narrowly escaped genuine disaster there.

"Does this mean I should never teach anyone the technique I know?"

"The short answer is 'yes'," Kakashi replied. "The long answer is that we have plenty of time on this trip, so I can probably go through what you know and figure out the differences between it and my own - normal - Shadow Clone Technique. Once I do that, I can tell you which parts you can teach and which parts you should keep to yourself. I can also tell you the common sense rules for teaching it. For example, you never teach a true clone technique to people with certain psychological problems."

"What do you mean?" Naruto had a sudden sense that he was treading on forbidden territory and should back away while it was still safe. But he needed to know.

"Unlike normal clones, which are mindless constructs run by basic artificial intelligence - what we call clone AI for short - shadow clones have minds which are copies of your own mind. They want what you want. What happens if you want to hurt yourself?"

Naruto thought about this. "That's... horrible."

It belatedly occurred to him that the more believable response was probably "why would someone want to hurt themselves?", but Kakashi-sensei didn't seem to notice.

"It's happened," Kakashi went on. "Normally, by the time you learn the Shadow Clone Technique, you're a Jōnin, with the experience to know who can and can't be taught. You, Naruto, will have to show just as much discretion."

Naruto swallowed. He'd wanted to teach it to Hinata to help her training, but now...

"That's enough of that for now," Kakashi (probably) smiled. "You need to know how to mute the pain from damage to your shadow clones. The training has two steps."

"What are those?"

"Step 1: Learn a basic mental technique and practise it until you can do it reflexively."

"That doesn't sound so bad. Unless it's one of those complicated techniques where you have to visualise stuff," Naruto commented. The majority of chakra control techniques they'd been taught in the Academy were visualisation-based, and they were generally agreed to be the hardest part of the curriculum.

"Now, for Step 2..." Kakashi paused. "Sakura, can you come in here?" he called out loudly.

Sakura's room was next door (with Naruto and Sasuke sharing the next one down, to their enormous displeasure), so she was quick to arrive.

"What's up, Kakashi-sensei?"

"Sakura, I need you to help Naruto with his training."

Sakura looked annoyed. "Do I have to? I just know he's going to be a pain about it."

Kakashi was unfazed. "Naruto is going to make perfect copies of himself, and I need you to destroy them as painfully as possible."

"Kakashi-sensei, you're the best teacher ever!" Sakura was suddenly almost giddy with excitement.

"Uh, are you absolutely sure this is the only way?" Naruto quickly asked, turning from her to Kakashi, his voice about an octave above normal.

Naruto felt Sakura put her hand on his shoulder. He turned back around to see that sweet, innocent look on her face which he'd come to dread above all others.

"Don't worry, Naruto... I'll be gentle."

-o-

When they set out the next morning, after receiving a strikingly prompt reply from Leaf (hand-delivered by a squad which also took away the surviving Demon Brother for interrogation), Naruto was approximately 70% more traumatised than before, but on the plus side had taken to the training like a duck to water once he had "stop Sakura hurting me" as motivation. He was starting to wonder whether the girl was destined for a future as an ANBU interrogator.

To take his mind off the Night From Hell, Naruto decided to continue quizzing Tazuna, in particular in regard to the information he'd previously withheld. Apparently, a rich tycoon named Gatō was behind all the horrible things happening in Wave, and it was his mercenaries, not bandits, that had sealed the shipping routes. Once this topic had been broached, the problem was not so much getting information out of Tazuna, but of finding a way to interrupt the laundry list of atrocities for which Gatō was apparently responsible.

Eventually, Naruto momentarily distracted Tazuna with a classic "hey, is that an assassin over there?" move, and left a shadow clone to listen to his rant while he went off to harangue Sasuke. Tazuna wasn't really clear on the differences between clones and originals, and accepted his new audience without complaints.

-o-

"I swear, Naruto, if you keep going on about your manga, I'm going to take this kunai and shove it right up-"

"Enough chatter, you two," Kakashi snapped. "Stay alert. I don't like this mist."

He had a point. They were walking through a clearing next to a small lake, and while one minute the air had been perfectly clear, in the next a thick mist had suddenly settled over the area. Not long after Kakashi's rebuke, it became so thick the group could barely see each other.

It was easy to be paranoid in this sort of environment, and everyone had kunai out within seconds.

"Get in formation," Kakashi ordered. "These conditions are perfect for an am-"

Suddenly, there was an odd sort of choked gurgling noise from Tazuna's direction. Kakashi couldn't see him, but the sound told him everything he needed to know.

It was the sound of a thrown kunai piercing a throat.


	6. Chapter 5

_A/N: Thank you for your continued support. Rest assured that all the issues people have brought up have been taken under consideration. If you spot any further issues or inconsistencies, please don't hesitate to let me know._

-o-

Before Kakashi could react, there was another sound, this one no less horrible: the unmistakeable sound of a large blade cleaving through flesh. Three times. Only incredible reflexes allowed him to bring up his own kunai in time to block, leaving him struggling to hold back the weight of the attacker's sword.

"Wind Element: Squall Technique!"

A sudden blast of pressurised air swept through the clearing, instantly wiping away the mist. The attacker's balance faltered for a split second. Since Kakashi had expected the technique, his did not, and he ducked under the sword as he brought his kunai up and through his enemy's stomach. He felt a rush of liquid down his hands. At the same time, a series of four popping noises sounded in quick succession around him.

"You live up to your reputation, Hatake 'Sharingan' Kakashi," a deep male voice commented.

Kakashi looked up to see his attacker, perfectly alive, standing on a high tree branch across the clearing, near the lake. A tall, well-muscled man, bare-chested and wearing grey camouflage gear on his limbs, he carried an enormous broadsword with a large circular hole near the top of the blade. Despite the white half-mask covering the lower part of his face, a sure sign of good taste in shinobi gear, the crossed-out Mist symbol on his headband and the unique weapon made him instantly recognisable.

Kakashi quickly glanced around. Just as planned, his squad was standing around him in perfect formation. Naruto, Sakura, Sasuke and Kakashi Prime were all in aggressive stances with weapons out. At a nod from the original, the clone dispelled himself.

"Momochi 'Demon' Zabuza," the real Kakashi replied. "One of the Seven Shinobi Swordsmen, and master of Silent Killing and Water Element techniques. It seems Gatō is really pulling out all the stops on this one."

"You sent a squad of shadow clones out as bait, knowing that you'd realise the instant one was destroyed, and had your real squad ready to take me out before I noticed that there was no sound of bodies hitting the ground," Zabuza observed. "I like your style. If that hadn't been a water clone, I'd be dead five ways by now."

There was no reply. Kakashi was busy analysing the terrain and estimating how much chakra he could spend on this fight. Naruto was busy being excited at the expectation of finally seeing experienced ninja fight, but also unnerved that every opponent they'd faced so far had "Demon" in their name. After that one vision of demons dragging his soul down to Hell, it cut a little close to the bone.

Meanwhile, Sakura was feeling proud of her team upon hearing Zabuza's compliment, and Sasuke was wondering if he'd misheard Zabuza's initial comment. "Sharingan" Kakashi? There was no possible way that could be right. Then again, he _did_ always keep his left eye covered up...

"Of course," Zabuza added, "if that hadn't been a water clone, it would have been me, and then _you'd_ all be dead by now. Or at least your little Genin would. They look like they've come straight from Leaf's ninja school, not waded through rivers of blood to get here like you and me, Kakashi."

A chill went through the younger three-quarters of Team Seven.

"Don't let him get to you," Kakashi said. "Psychological warfare is one of the basic weapons of the shinobi. If he can convince you that you're weaker than you really are, he's already won."

"You think I'm trying to screw with their minds?" Zabuza asked. "Why would I bother? Their lives are already forfeit - I'm just letting them die with their eyes open. Let them see how they have been sent to certain death, their lives traded for money as one resource for another, while their leaders continue to preach of loyalty and bonds."

Naruto could see his team's mood sinking rapidly. The cool confidence with which Zabuza was talking about their deaths was somehow more frightening than any amount of angry threats, and for all Kakashi-sensei's virtues, he didn't think an inspirational pep talk was in the offing.

On the other hand, Naruto himself wasn't terribly affected. While Zabuza's delivery put him head and shoulders above most people Naruto had heard before, the fact remained that he'd grown up on death threats and intimidation the way most children had grown up being told to brush their teeth before bed and eat their greens. Until Zabuza was actually ready to fight, he wasn't inherently scarier than, say, Mr Yamada from downstairs, who had threatened to cut Naruto's limbs off with a rusty saw when he thought Naruto was the one stealing his newspaper.

Besides, to Zabuza convincing untruths delivered with perfect self-assurance were a trick to soften up his opponents before battle. To Naruto, confidently spouting utter bullshit was a way of life. Zabuza was challenging him on his home ground, and Naruto wasn't going down without a fight.

"I know what you're doing!" Naruto exclaimed. "But you're not the only one with this secret Bloodline Limit. Windbag Element: Endless Monologue Technique!"

Naruto struck a dramatic pose, his hands in front of his wide-open mouth as if projecting a sonic beam out of it.

Everyone present, including Zabuza, was now giving him a somewhat incredulous look.

"Oops, I forgot," Naruto confessed. "The Endless Monologue Technique doesn't actually do anything. It's just a way to enjoy the sound of my own voice. Then again, I'm just a doomed little Genin. Maybe it does something different when used by a Jōnin?"

He looked up at Zabuza. "Well? We're all waiting."

There was silence for several seconds. Then there was a sudden "snerk" as Sasuke finally failed to suppress his laughter.

"Naruto, you are such a moron!" Sakura likewise gave up resisting the call of her most fundamental instincts.

Kakashi just rolled his eyes in resignation. He couldn't for the life of him remember what he'd done to the Hokage that was bad enough to deserve getting assigned this team.

Zabuza, meanwhile, now knew exactly whom he was going to eviscerate first. Without wasting any more time, he jumped off the tree branch - and straight onto the surface of the lake. His landing was so perfect that the surface barely rippled.

"Water Element: Water Clone Technique!"

Six identical Zabuzas rose from the surface of the water. As soon as they were fully formed, they moved as one in the direction Team Seven had come from.

Kakashi turned towards them and started forming seals, but was forced to abort as Zabuza's blade suddenly came down. The man had appeared in front of him with unbelievable speed for someone of his build.

"I don't think so, Kakashi. _I'm_ your opponent."

To the eyes of Team Seven, the two men turned into one incomprehensibly fast blur of ducking, swiping, lunging and blocking.

"Intercept them before they find Tazuna!" Kakashi called out.

Zabuza laughed. "You're willing to sacrifice your Genin team just to slow me down?" he asked loudly. "And here I'd been told Leaf had grown soft in its days of peace."

"Don't listen to him!" Kakashi shouted at Team Seven's retreating backs. "Water clones only have a tenth of the original's power! You can do this!"

-o-

Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura faced off against the six water clones, which had evidently decided to eliminate their pursuers early on rather than risk being backstabbed. Each one had a copy of Zabuza's huge sword, and a stance that spoke of decades of experience in using it to kill.

Things didn't look good. What did Kakashi-sensei mean about a tenth of the original's power? Were they a tenth as fast? A tenth as intelligent? Did they have a tenth of the original's chakra? Naruto needed more information, and he needed a way of getting the rest of the team through this alive.

"Elemental clones are pre-programmed constructs," Sasuke suddenly announced. "They can't think for themselves to adapt to new challenges. So our best shot is trying to surprise them."

Naruto caught himself nodding before he could help it. This was good thinking. The catch, of course, was that Zabuza seemed like a skilled clone user. Skilled users of elemental clone techniques were pretty rare, because making clones that could actually fight alongside you, rather than just being disposable materials for one-shot stratagems, was incredibly hard. You had to have a solid grasp of clone AI in order to devise effective behaviour patterns for them, and you had to practise until you could create a clone with a complex program at a moment's notice without having to take time to concentrate. Creating a high-quality elemental clone was like trying to write a publishable academic treatise in your head, in a couple of seconds, under combat conditions. Naruto had invested a lot of time and effort into studying clone AI, mostly through experimentation thanks to his limited access to books, and was immensely grateful when the Shadow Clone Technique suddenly allowed him to stop worrying about it.

So if Zabuza was a skilled clone user, they were in trouble. Especially if he was one of the select few who understood emergent behaviour. An elite clone user, Naruto knew from his reading, would emphasise high levels of basic abilities like dodging and taijutsu, and then program the clone to scan the situation for ways to combine them as effectively as possible, rather than developing specific behaviour patterns for all the possible individual scenarios. These were scary, ANBU levels of skill, but they undeniably made the clones far more flexible, and thus far more deadly.

"Naruto," Sasuke snapped him out of his contemplation. Quickly turning so that his hands couldn't be seen from the front, he made the hand signs for "distraction", "three" and "second".

Naruto nodded. If surprise was the way to overcome Zabuza's clones, then he would do his best to oblige.

"Uzumaki-style Ninjutsu: Harem Technique!"

A dozen naked girls appeared out of nowhere, all of them looking suspiciously like an older, gender-swapped Naruto, and with curiously static wisps of cloud around certain parts of their anatomy. Naruto suddenly felt a wave of intense killing intent, but from Sakura rather than the water clones. Before she even had time to comment, however, the girls had closed the distance to their targets, and were trying to drape themselves over the water clones with exclamations along the lines of "oh, Master Zabuza, your sword is so big!" and "I've always had a thing for sextuplets!" There were also at least three different puns on "wet".

For obvious reasons, Zabuza had not programmed these clones to resist seduction. For a second, they froze, uncertain what to do with very obviously unarmed women acting in a non-hostile (and in fact downright friendly) fashion. Then, moving as one, they destroyed them with precise hand strikes to vital areas, but by then it was too late. As the mist caused by the shadow clones' destruction dissipated, they heard Sasuke's voice.

"Fūma Shuriken!"

A large, four-bladed shuriken flew towards the clone in the middle at chest level. He was about to duck under it, when one of the others, with a different angle of view, suddenly exclaimed "shadow windmill!"

The clone instantly changed its mind and stepped just to the side, allowing both the shuriken and the second one hidden below it, in its shadow, to fly by harmlessly.

Then the exploding tag on the hidden shuriken detonated.

The dodging clone was instantly obliterated. As an added bonus, the force of the explosion flung the original shuriken to the side, and into another clone, forcing it to explode into water.

Sakura started to cheer, but was abruptly cut off.

"Water Element: Concealing Mist Technique!"

Within seconds, visibility was down to zero, and the Genin were up against four clones of what Kakashi had warned them was a master of tracking and killing by sound alone. The mist might as well have been a solid grey wall, wrapping around them and taking away all sense of distance and direction. None of the three could hear anything except their own heartbeats, which grew ever louder as the suspense mounted.

Naruto's, however, was growing louder with excitement. Earlier, Zabuza had broken one of the cardinal rules of the ninja: he'd let an enemy see his speciality technique and survive. And after feeling his shadow clones pop in Zabuza's mist the first time, Naruto had been preparing. In his mind, he divided the battlefield into a hexagonal grid.

"Multiple Shadow Clone Technique!"

Within seconds, a shadow clone was running in circles (well, hexes) around the edge of each hex, each clone singing a different song (or occasionally the same song to a different tune), as loudly as possible. The cacophony was worse than that time he'd left a gunpowder trail leading from Captain Asuma's favourite smoking spot, to a carefully concealed fuse, to a closed crate of fireworks labelled "tax ordinance paperwork" in the Hokage's office. Let's see Zabuza track him or his teammates by sound now.

Unsurprisingly, he immediately felt one of his shadow clones get sliced in half. Then another. And another. And then...

"Gotcha." Naruto didn't say this out loud. Instead, he said "Shadow Clone Technique."

A clone appeared next to him and instantly dispelled itself again. Every shadow clone immediately knew what Naruto had known when he used the technique: namely, that there was a Zabuza clone at coordinate 16-D.

Over a dozen shadow clones converged on that one point, and between their sheer numbers and the fact that the water clone was as blind as they were with all the noise, at least one kunai got through.

Three left.

Unfortunately, the water clones had not been programmed to continue a tactic that left them at a disadvantage. The mist quickly dissipated, and then the Zabuzas moved with the speed of hungry sharks. Within seconds, all of the grid-running clones were destroyed. Now Naruto was alone with Sasuke and Sakura on the far side of the clearing.

That was the point at which things went wrong.

The clones moved in fast. One went for each of the three Genin, and Naruto no longer had the leisure to keep track of his teammates. He ducked under a swipe that would have decapitated him, then just barely managed to block a knee blow that would have crushed his ribs. It still sent him flying back across the clearing, and only an emergency mid-air Shadow Clone Technique to summon a clone as padding allowed him to soften the impact of the tree he hit.

Zabuza's taijutsu was devastating, and there was no possible way to fight back. It was all Naruto could do to avoid taking direct hits, and try to drag the battle out as long as possible in the hope that some opportunity would present itself. If the worst came to the worst, he could use some of _those _techniques, but... but then they'd know. And he'd lose everything he'd spent years building up. It probably wasn't as bad as being eviscerated by Zabuza, but it came pretty damn close.

Sasuke was faring better, but not by much. He was more agile than Naruto, but Zabuza's blade doubled as a very effective shield thanks to its extraordinary breadth, and the circular hole near the top allowed the clone to keep watching Sasuke while blocking, minimising the blind spot. Sasuke tried several times to stab his opponent through it, but its creator was clearly experienced in using it this way, and the clone kept shifting its position and angle too fast to allow any such trick.

And then, as Naruto was busy jumping back out of range of a deadly swipe, and Sasuke was desperately recovering from a failed lunge, the third clone cut Sakura in half.

Or so it thought. The two halves of the log clattered to the ground as Sakura reappeared next to a tree at the edge of the clearing. Though exhausted and terrified, she allowed herself a quick smile. She really _was_ good at the Substitution Technique.

Zabuza was better. Another clone, taking a break from fighting Naruto, was waiting for her as she reappeared. With a single, casual movement, it smashed her head into the tree. Sakura fell, and stopped moving.

Sasuke was standing at an angle which let him see this, and the sight appeared to send him into a frenzy. His rapid kunai strikes actually broke Zabuza's momentum, and the second he made an opening, Sasuke instantly leapt back.

"Fire Element: Great Fireball Technique!"

The clone had no room to dodge the enormous fireball coming towards it. Instead, it did something unexpected. It threw its sword at the flames. As it sailed through the air, the blade exploded into pure water, and contact with it diminished the fireball to the point that it didn't do enough damage to dispel the clone.

Sasuke cursed silently. Of course his fire techniques would be weak against the water element. He charged in to press his advantage, but unfortunately, the water clones were faster. The unarmed clone fled as Sakura's former opponent took its place.

An enormous blade cut down as Sasuke, still running forwards, was unable to arrest his momentum. It cut right through his shoulder...

And once again a bisected log tumbled to the ground.

In a flash, Sasuke appeared at the edge of the clearing. The unarmed clone was waiting for him, but before it could even begin to move, Sasuke disappeared again within the same instant.

He reappeared where he'd been before, sending half the log back to its original location. Before the clone could lift its sword, it found a kunai thrust through its neck.

Two left.

Unfortunately, this seemed to trigger something within the clones, as their levels of aggression suddenly spiked.

"Water Element: Water Bullet!"

A mass of compressed water shot at Sasuke's head with incredible speed. It was all he could do to dive sideways to avoid it, then push his hands against the ground and go into an impromptu cartwheel to dodge the second shot.

And then suddenly the unarmed clone was lying on the ground next to him, having swapped places with Sakura's log. Sasuke only had time to marvel for an instant at how effectively he'd been driven into position before the clone's arm snapped out, grabbed his head, and slammed it viciously against the ground. Sasuke was down.

Meanwhile, the other clone had also stopped reserving its limited chakra supply.

"Water Element: Geyser Blade Technique!"

Before Naruto could dodge, a sudden blast of pressurised water came out of the ground beneath his feet, faster and more devastating even than Zabuza's sword. Within a mere second, there was nothing left of him.

At least until a new pair of shadow clones appeared in the place of a couple of fallen tree branches across the clearing.

"You call yourselves clones? Any true clone would know never to let the original onto the battlefield."

The Zabuzas turned to face the Narutos. The unarmed one drew a kunai.

Both Narutos considered the battlefield. Sasuke and Sakura were out, but they seemed to be breathing. Which figured. If a professional assassin like Zabuza had wanted them dead, he'd have finished them off the second they were disabled. Why he hadn't done so, of course, was another question.

"You guys just made two extremely stupid mistakes," Naruto A informed them.

"You hurt my team," Naruto B continued.

"And you made sure they couldn't see me fight," Naruto A finished.

"And now you pay."

The two clones started making seals at the same time as the Zabuzas charged towards them. They finished just before the enemy got within striking range.

"Uzumaki-style Genjutsu: Void Prison!"

There was a blur of _something_ coming from the Narutos' hands too fast to comprehend, and then each Zabuza froze. Suddenly, all light and sound had vanished from the world, leaving only limitless darkness. It was as if they were trapped in the void before creation, empty of anything but their own awareness (or so the original Zabuza would have thought - his clones had no need for poetic thinking, and so were not capable of it).

There was an obvious routine for dealing with genjutsu. Each Zabuza sheathed its weapon and made the dispelling seal.

"Dispel!"

Nothing happened. Nor with a second attempt, nor a third.

The Zabuzas retrieved their blades. For a few seconds, they stood perfectly still, analysing the situation.

Fact: the caster's level of observed combat skill placed them solidly in the Genin category, even with the anomalous use of shadow clones.

Fact: few Genin were competent with genjutsu.

Fact: this was clearly an advanced genjutsu that created a coherent illusionary world apparently outside the target's body, rather than a basic blockage or warping of the senses. This explained why the clones could hear their own breathing but no other sounds, and why they could feel their bodies, weapons etc., but nothing beyond them.

Fact: even with their reduced chakra levels, with Jōnin-level mastery of the Dispelling Technique the clones should have been able to break a Genin's genjutsu.

Fact: the probability of successfully using genjutsu on a clone was very low to begin with due to differences between the ways humans and clones processed information, and a Genin could not be expected to possess that level of special expertise.

These statements combined meant that the experience the clones were undergoing had an extremely low probability of actually occurring.

When undergoing an extremely low-probability experience, seek additional data for verification.

The clones began to loudly intone a very low note, gradually going up in pitch. They stopped very quickly.

Confirmation. The acoustic properties of the space they were in were not those of infinite emptiness. They were those of a fairly confined, soundproofed space.

The two Zabuzas struck out in front of them, and suddenly there was light, and the puff of mist of a clone being destroyed. A few quick motions got rid of the remaining four clones "disguised" as interlocking soundproof black panels.

Then the clones' experiences diverged.

The first, sword-wielding, clone saw a kunai flying towards it, and automatically raised its sword to block.

"Uzumaki-style Taijutsu: Battering Ram Technique!"

With a flicker, the kunai was replaced by Naruto A. Then, in the same instant, Naruto A disappeared again. He was replaced by an enormous log. And thanks to the wonderful property of momentum exchange, which allowed even fast-moving ninja to use the Substitution Technique to safely swap with static objects, the log was moving at thrown kunai speed.

The blow took the clone clean off its feet. Then, as it fell, Naruto A replaced the log once again, and started stabbing. The water clone never had a chance.

Meanwhile, the other Zabuza clone found a hail of shuriken flying at it in a wide spread. Most of them went hopelessly wide, flying above the clone's head and off to its sides. What few were on target were effortlessly deflected with a kunai block.

Naruto B was unfazed.

"Uzumaki-style Taijutsu: Trick Shot Technique!"

As the shuriken passed Zabuza, each one turned into a shadow clone, and each shadow clone, still in mid-flight, started to throw kunai as fast as it could draw them.

There were too many angles, and not enough time to turn. The clone was destroyed even before Naruto B's own supplementary kunai could reach it.

It was over.

A few seconds later, a bush near the edge of the clearing turned into the real Naruto. He gave the clones an approving nod, and all three busied themselves with trying to wake Sasuke and Sakura.

Unfortunately, his teammates were out cold. Then again, the fact that they weren't dead, and had apparently avoided any major injuries, was more than good enough. After leaving Naruto A and B to drag them out of sight and stand guard, and dispelling the other clones he'd concealed around the area during the Concealing Mist Technique, Naruto himself ran off to back up Kakashi.

His haste turned out to be unwarranted. He met Kakashi halfway back, apparently hurrying to do the exact same thing for Team Seven.

Naruto filled him in. His story was a masterpiece he'd concocted on the way, managing to describe the battle in a way that was entirely consistent with what Sakura and Sasuke had seen, _and _to make it sound like their success was mostly thanks to Sasuke, _and _to make it sound like Naruto was trying to downplay Sasuke's role as much as possible in favour of his own.

Kakashi seemed impressed. "You took out all six? I'm proud of you three. I thought you'd manage to whittle their numbers down enough to stand your ground until I was done with Zabuza, but this is extraordinary."

"So what happened with Zabuza, anyway?" Naruto asked.

Kakashi's (probable) smile vanished. "He outplayed me. I was about to finish him off when a Mist hunter-nin came in, dealt the deathblow with a thrown needle, and retrieved the body."

"Why's that bad?" Naruto endeavoured to look confused, although he could already see where this was going. "Isn't it those guys' job to kill missing-nin and destroy the bodies before anyone can get village secrets out of them?"

"That's just it," Kakashi explained. "It's unusual for them to retrieve the body instead of destroying it, and when they do retrieve it they normally use a special seal for storing corpses in scrolls. They certainly don't carry it off by hand, especially when the body is so much bigger than they are.

"And unfortunately, I only realised all of this three seconds after the hunter-nin moved out of combat range," he added. "Following him would have meant abandoning you three, and I didn't have enough chakra left after fighting Zabuza to split it with shadow clones and still face an opponent of unknown level."

Kakashi-sensei was being unusually forthcoming, it occurred to Naruto. Was he feeling guilty? Some small part of Naruto's mind stored this behaviour pattern away for later use.

"So you're saying... what? That it wasn't a real hunter-nin?"

Kakashi nodded. "He's probably one of Zabuza's allies. That means Zabuza is still alive, and now he's seen many of my best techniques, and has time to work out counters for them. And if he was planning this from the start, he probably took care not to show me _his_ best techniques, so we can't do the same."

Naruto swallowed. "So what do we do?"

"Fortunately, we have time to prepare as well," Kakashi told him. "Being put into a feigned death state with a needle throw isn't something you simply shrug off. Assuming that, in the worst-case scenario, our reinforcements don't arrive on time, we're going to get to Wave, and then I'm going to train you three as best I can for the final confrontation. At least we can be fairly sure we'll be safe until Zabuza is ready - his pride and his professional reputation both demand that he not let another mercenary finish his job."

After picking up Sasuke and Sakura, and retrieving Tazuna from his camouflaged hiding place, they stopped by the original lake so that Kakashi could pick up his used ninja tools. And Naruto's jaw dropped.

The place was some kind of elemental hell. Enormous, sharp spikes of rock rose from the lake, some of them partially broken off. Water-filled chasms divided up the landscape, with crumbling remnants of stone walls jutting up at random points. Many of the trees around the edge had been completely uprooted, while others had perfectly round holes punched clean through their trunks.

_This_ was how Jōnin fought when they didn't have to worry about friendly fire.


	7. Chapter 6

_A/N: The arc proceeds steadily towards its inevitable conclusion. This story *will* diverge from canon, increasingly so as time goes by. In-universe, the story starts very close to canon, but from there deviation can only increase as the differences stack with each other to throw the story off its original course. Out of universe, starting close to canon allows me to get comfortable with the characters and the AU, and get my writing skills up to scratch before the greater challenge of opening up wholly new territory (the timeline for which has already been decided)._

_It can be inferred from the behaviour of Zabuza's clones that while he is happy to spare the Genin if convenient, he will not take any actual risks in order to do so. Trying to avoid a lethal first strike before he had a chance to gauge his opponents' level of skill would most certainly have been a risk to him._

_Assuming Kakashi's techniques are *literally* a thousand in number (which is far from given), they are likely to contain many with overlapping functions, as well as many specialised ones only useful in specific situations, and many he doesn't actually like but knows inside out so that he can counter them if necessary. He may have an extraordinary technique "vocabulary" compared to most ninja, but like all human beings, his passive vocabulary must be far bigger than his active one._

_Due to my limited lair situation, and present lack of funds for new minion upkeep, I request that readers refrain from offering firstborn children as tribute at this time. An exception may be made, subject to extensive security checks, for firstborn old enough to commit financially profitable acts of evil with minimal supervision._

-o-

Morino Ibiki was a frightening man. He was not like Iruka-sensei, who sometimes tried to act tough but was really a big softie underneath. He was not like Mizuki-sensei, who was all smiles until the moment he thought someone wasn't showing him respect, when he suddenly lashed out like an angry snake. He wasn't even like Kataoka-sensei, who had scary shiny glasses and an obsession with discipline, but also bought the class sweets at the end of term if everyone passed the test. Morino Ibiki acted like the second he thought you were a threat, even if you were his best friend or his brother, he would knock you out and have you taken away, and then nobody would ever see you again. When they first met him at the special guest lecture at the Academy, none of the children were aware that this was literally true.

"Members of the civilian population often ask me," Ibiki began, "'what is a ninja?' Who here can tell me the answer?"

No-one responded for a while. Then, a blonde girl in the middle of the assembly hesitantly raised her hand. Ibiki nodded at her.

"Someone who fights bad people to protect the village."

"Good. Anyone else?"

A boy wearing a pair of sunglasses raised his hand next.

"Someone who carries out missions to bring money to the village."

Ibiki nodded, and let a few more children offer their definitions. He especially liked one particularly serious-looking girl's idea of a ninja as "someone who uses knowledge as a tool to get what she wants". He made a note to find out her name.

"Those are all reasonable definitions," he told the audience. "But there's one you've all missed out, and it may be the most important."

"A ninja is a killer."

He instantly had everyone's total attention.

"You were told when you entered the Academy that the life of a ninja is full of sacrifice. You were told that one day, you might be called upon to give your lives for the sake of your comrades and the village. But the first sacrifice you must make to become a ninja is both simpler and more cruel. You must sacrifice your innocence."

The children listened to Ibiki, wide-eyed. The deep, rock-solid conviction they could see in his eyes was proof that he'd personally lived every word of what he was now telling them.

"Every single one of you, if you graduate and become Genin, will face enemies of Leaf in battle. You will have to kill. At that time, if you hesitate for even a second, you will be killed first. This is why, among the many qualities you need to be a ninja, the most important one is killing intent."

He paused to let the idea sink in, and slowly let his gaze sweep over the assembly. Each of the children felt like the tall, imposing man was looking directly into their eyes.

"In the coming months, many of you will drop out of the Academy because you have no killing intent. There is no shame in this. There are many ways you can serve the village, and just as some of you have the qualities needed to serve as ninja, so the rest will discover their own unique skills in time. A community that could do nothing but kill would not be worth protecting.

"For those who stay, understand what you are sacrificing for the village. The other man may not be a villain. He may be fighting for _his_ comrades and _his _village, and doing what _he_ believes to be right. He may be just like you in every possible way. Yet he is the enemy."

Ibiki let every word of his final sentence fall into place in an exact, inexorable rhythm. "And you must kill him before he kills you."

-o-

That day and that speech were burned into the mind of every single Academy student. In accordance with Morino Ibiki's prediction, the number of students dropped sharply, the first wave leaving in the immediate aftermath, then more as they began the special classes designed to condition them to kill, and many found themselves unable to murder a living enemy, even when that enemy was really a clone or an illusion.

Leaf, Naruto's reading told him, had been the pioneer of a form of conditioning that did not involve forcing young shinobi to suppress their emotions in order to be able to treat enemies as simple targets rather than living human beings (as every village had done before). Instead, they were taught to find motivations which reinforced their personalities, allowing them to face the full impact of killing without crumbling under the stress. Thus the zealotry of those who believed in the Will of Fire, thus the emphasis on willing sacrifice, on the centrality of the village to their lives, and on the preciousness of bonds and the need to protect them. Instead of tough, brittle ninja that believed in nothing and obeyed orders perfectly, at the price of a sizeable chunk of their psychological health and overall potential, Leaf trained ninja who fought with genuine passion, and thought that their beliefs and values were freely chosen. Of course, the textbooks didn't quite frame it that way, being more along the lines of "Leaf became the strongest village because it allowed its shinobi to fulfil their full potential as human beings", but Naruto's status as a social near-outcast left him perfectly situated to read between the lines.

He hadn't been in a position to reflect on his first kill during the Night From Hell, nor during the chaos of the day that followed. Afterwards, they'd made double time to the next inn on their route, since having half the team disabled left them extremely vulnerable out on the road, and any other mercenaries might not yet have got the memo that Zabuza wanted to get his own revenge. So now, here Naruto was, lying awake and wondering: as someone who wasn't taken in by illusions like "community" and "comrades", what was _he_ fighting and killing for? Why had he found it so easy to take lives when he'd never internalised the beliefs that absolved others of guilt for things done in the line of duty?

It wasn't just because of the kill-or-be-killed situations, he knew. People fighting for their lives could still freeze up just like anyone else. Nor was it because, in the purest technical sense, he hadn't killed anyone - although it was true that Sasuke had been the one to deal the death blow to the Demon Brother, and Zabuza's water clones had never really been alive in any meaningful sense to begin with. Try as he might to be satisfied with a simple explanation like that, Naruto couldn't rid himself of the feeling that there was a deeper, truer reason why he had always seen becoming able to kill as less of a tragic sacrifice and more of a broadening of options.

-o-

Sakura wasn't sleeping either. Yesterday she'd watched Sasuke kill an enemy ninja without hesitation, his movements beautiful, precise, and utterly without mercy. She'd tried to put it out of her mind, tried not to question what that meant - about Sasuke, about ninja in general, about her future - but then today another ninja had very nearly done the same to her, as if to say "reality is brutal, and it's not going away".

Was this going to be her life from now on? Was she going to have to wade through rivers of blood like Zabuza and Kakashi-sensei? Was this what she'd joined the shinobi Academy to become?

Then she heard the voice of Inner Sakura, who did not sound pleased. "Quit moping around, you moron. I'll tell you what you _didn't_ want to become, and that's some angsty little girl who starts having a crisis in the middle of her first serious mission."

"But... what am I supposed to do?" Sakura asked. "I'm not like Sasuke. I can't kill people just like that, without hesitation, just because they're the enemy. I thought it would be easier. I thought as long as I was fighting for the village, and for my parents, and for my friends, I'd be able to do anything. But what if I can't?"

Inner Sakura rolled her eyes. "You've really forgotten, haven't you?"

"Forgotten what?"

Inner Sakura waved her hand. Inside their shared mind, there was an image - a memory - of a little pink-haired girl hiding timidly behind a taller blonde girl while everyone around them played or picked flowers in the wide green field.

The pink-haired girl's feelings washed through Sakura. Fear of stepping out on her own. Gratitude to her protector. A desperate need to cling to her, and fear of being abandoned. And more and more as time went by, shame. Shame made only deeper every time her parents compared her to Ino in the bizarre belief that telling her all the ways in which she was bad would somehow make her better.

"Now do you remember?" Inner Sakura demanded. "You swore, you _swore_ to yourself that you would never be that girl again. You _made me_ because you were so terrified of going back.

"You wanted to be strong, " Inner Sakura told her. "You wanted to be what she couldn't, to have what she couldn't. To have them look at you and see _you_, not her. You decided to be a ninja, to do whatever it took. You studied until your head was ready to explode, just because you knew you were book-smart and she wasn't."

Sakura nodded, her eyes moist with tears. "Yeah."

"Am I getting through here?" Inner Sakura asked rhetorically. "Good. Now, if you want to throw all that away because you don't have the guts to face what being a ninja really means, that's your call. I can go. You can be that little girl again to your heart's content."

Sakura shook her head rapidly. "No. That's not what I want."

"Or... you could get your ass in gear and show Sasuke that you're a real kunoichi, and twice the woman Ino is."

Sakura was quiet for a few seconds. Then she nodded. "Three times the woman."

"Atta girl," Inner Sakura grinned. "You're gonna do just fine."

"Hell yeah!"

-o-

Sasuke did indeed have his complaints about Sakura's behaviour, but it was nothing to do with her status as a kunoichi. Last night, he'd heard Naruto go into Kakashi-sensei's room. Then Sakura went in as well. Then they'd both gone to Sakura's room - which was fine, as he had things to think about, and was more than happy being left undisturbed in the room Kakashi-sensei had so cruelly made him share with Naruto. But then the noises had started.

The sounds of physical exertion would have been pretty innocent on their own, but then Naruto started moaning and groaning, and saying things like "No, Sakura, not there..." and "I can't keep this up much longer" in an out-of-breath voice, and Sakura was no better, with exclamations such as "oh, that felt so good," and "summon more clones - we're just getting started" and "you call yourself a man with stamina like that?", delivered with increasing exhilaration. The noise went on all night, leaving Sasuke unable to sleep or to concentrate on anything whatsoever (and there was no way in hell he was going over there to tell them to shut up).

He gave them a proper earful in the morning, of course, after finding out what they'd really been up to, but as with most things with Naruto, it was in one ear and out the other (though Sakura did at least try to act apologetic).

But now he could finally get some peace and quiet and reflect on the mission so far. They were clearly in over their heads. Kakashi-sensei had told them that he'd spoken to the leader of the support squad that had come to take the surviving Demon Brother away, providing a detailed description of their route and requesting an A-rank team to catch up to them as soon as possible to hand over the rest of the mission. It was a good call, to Sasuke's mind. If he'd sent the request for help and the route description with the dog, it could have been intercepted, allowing the enemy to lay some devastating ambushes. Keeping it as verbal information memorised by a ninja squad was far safer. It would have been even safer if they'd turned back, or stayed still to wait for backup, but apparently there would only be one window for Tazuna's Wave contacts to sneak them past Gatō's blockade in the nearby future, and they couldn't risk missing it.

As for the mission itself... they were cutting it very fine indeed. He still didn't know how that last fight hadn't been a total wipeout, since he'd regained consciousness after Kakashi and Naruto had both gone to sleep. Sakura didn't know either. Still, his brush with death and the dubious competence of his team (or at least of Sakura - he didn't know what to make of Naruto lately) aside, it had been everything he'd hoped for. As long as he kept fighting enemies like these, he would grow stronger quickly. Every victory would be another step towards his goal.

Except... he hadn't even hesitated before killing that Demon Brother. It hadn't occurred to him to question what he was doing, or to make a conscious decision about taking lives. Had _he _hesitated before killing their parents in the name of _his _unknown ambition? Or had it been this easy for _him_ too? Was this how it happened? Was there a slippery slope where you had no trouble dispatching your enemies, then moved on to your friends, then your family? Was it Sasuke's destiny to become the next Itachi?

No, he told himself. The battlefield was a place only for those who were willing to risk their lives in the name of a greater goal. He had his goal, and was prepared to risk his life for it. His enemies had theirs, and did the same. It was right and proper and honourable that one would win and grow stronger, while the other would lose and be destroyed. Whether he won or lost, he would respect the law of the battlefield. He would never be as weak as the coward who killed civilians, even children, with weapons that had been forged to protect them.

-o-

The rest of the journey to the Country of the Wave was blissfully uneventful, although Sakura and Sasuke did treat Naruto somewhat strangely after learning that he had taken out two Zabuza clones on his own after they got knocked unconscious. It had taken a week of sustained buffoonery before they relaxed and decided that his victory must have been through sheer incredible luck after all.

The crossing into Wave had to be done late at night so as to avoid Gatō's patrol boats, with a complicated signalling system to bring Tazuna's boatman ally to them without alerting anyone to their presence. It was almost ninja-like in its level of stealth and precision. When Naruto asked about this, he learned that pretty much all of the survivors from Wave's former militia (which was a depressingly small number) had flocked to Tazuna's project, bringing such military expertise as they had with them. They included a few elderly ex-ninja who had no families left in their home villages, and had chosen to move to Wave for its idyllic landscapes and excellent climate. While too old and/or crippled to fight, and unwilling to divulge any ninja-specific secrets (or willing but unable due to the legitimate fear of assassination by hunter-nin), they were more than happy to share quality strategic advice in the name of getting back at the man ruining their retirement.

The moral of the story, Naruto concluded, was never to piss off a ninja.

Be that as it may, as morning dawned they finally arrived in one of the larger towns on their way to Tazuna's home village (which was, in turn, within walking distance of the bridge construction site). Kakashi made the call to go through the town rather than spend time circumnavigating it, so this is where Team Seven got their first glimpse of life in the Country of the Wave.

Streets of empty or nearly-empty shops, many of them boarded up. Unnaturally thin, empty-eyed passers-by, with hunched shoulders, gazes fixed on the ground and faces concealed beneath their bizarre onion-top hats. Streets that were simultaneously paved with high-quality cobblestones and caked with filth and dirt. And countless homeless children lining the corners and alleyways. Naruto watched the townspeople look past the children with apathetic eyes, as if they simply weren't there, and something inside him snapped.

Knowing he might well regret it later, Naruto nevertheless started to give coins from his frog-shaped wallet to the children they passed. After a little while, Sakura started doing the same, albeit some way away and on the other side of the street, in case anyone thought that Naruto's behaviour had in some way influenced her. And before too long, the party of five had an ever-growing crowd of street children following them, begging for money.

"Nice job drawing attention to us, you imbecile," Sasuke snapped at Naruto.

Naruto's anger at the world he was living in immediately extended itself to Sasuke. He grabbed him by the collar. "You got a problem with how I choose to spend my money?"

"I do when it affects the mission," Sasuke retaliated. "And what do you think this is going to accomplish anyway? Those kids are going to get maybe one good meal out of your money, and then they'll be back where they started, and nothing will have changed. Tazuna's got the right idea with his bridge - it's big, meaningful things that make a difference to the world, not playing at being everybody's friend for a day."

Naruto shoved Sasuke away. "You spoiled little rich kid," he growled. "What the hell do you know?! You've never had to go hungry in your entire life. You've never had to look to people for help and have them turn away as if you just existing was a personal affront to them. You couldn't begin to understand what it means to receive a single act of kindness from somebody who could have walked away. So I'm telling you right now. Shut the fuck up before I make you."

Sakura, watching the fight develop, felt like she should be intervening. But on whose side? What Sasuke was saying made sense to her, but at the same time it felt like he was going all the way through "cool" and into "cold", and she wasn't comfortable with that. Sakura's parents drove her crazy on a daily basis, but she'd never actually had to think about what it could be like to have no home to come back to, or the possibility of being hungry and not being able to afford food. Somewhere, some important part of her had retreated into the very depths of her being, frozen in shock at what she was seeing, and to that part Naruto's rage was like a beacon calling her home.

Before Sakura could even begin to sort out her feelings, Kakashi stepped in. "I'm not going to intervene in your ethical debate, but I will point out that extra attention is actually an advantage for us. Wave has no ninja village. To most of them, shinobi are mystical beings of legend with unimaginable supernatural powers. Seeing us on their side will be a major boost for morale, which will benefit our work in all sorts of ways.

"From a more long-term perspective," he added, "Wave has been cut off from the rest of the world for a long time. For many, this is their first impression of Hidden Leaf. Right now, it's an impression of wealth and generosity, not to mention the fact that we've defeated the previously unstoppable Gatō twice with no losses.

"I should also remind you that you can expect B-rank or A-rank pay for this mission, so lack of personal finances is not something you should worry about right now." With that, Kakashi returned to his position next to Tazuna. Naruto did notice, however, that he didn't give any of his own money away.

-o-

The team's mood was tense when they finally arrived at Tazuna's house in a small village not far from the shore. It was a fairly large house, but it had clearly seen better days - which figured, since with Tazuna gone, the only people left to look after it had been his daughter Tsunami and her son Inari.

While the black-haired little boy was very quiet, perhaps shy, his mother was the very soul of hospitality. It was quite incredible how, without the assistance of shadow clones, she managed to simultaneously get everyone's bags put away in the guest rooms, prepare and serve a vast quantity of seafood broth, lecture her father for gaining so much weight during his time away, quiz everyone on news from the outside world, and generally make Team Seven feel like honoured guests. Sasuke, to his utter horror, became a special target, as Tsunami decided his slight frame obviously meant he wasn't eating enough, and proceeded to ply him with extra helpings while cooing about the poor emaciated boy and how she would restore a rosy glow to his cheeks if it was the last thing she did. Naruto wanted to laugh his head off, but was afraid this might draw her attention to him instead.

The good food and pleasant conversation helped everyone relax, and after a variety of small talk, the conversation turned to the bridge, and the progress that had been made in Tazuna's absence - less than desired, since Tazuna was apparently the only person with the necessary expertise who hadn't been blackmailed or otherwise intimidated into submission by Gatō's goons, but still enough to hopefully keep things on schedule.

"Relax, Tsunami," Naruto boasted. "We're the top three ninja of Leaf's younger generation, and Kakashi-sensei here may not look like much, but he's a great hero of the Third Great Ninja War. Between our strength and your bridge, we're going to kick Gatō's ass so hard they're going to have to rename him Jellō! Believe it!"

Suddenly Inari stood up sharply. "You're all stupid! You think you're heroes? Gatō's going to kill you like he's killed everyone else! Nobody can fight him! If you have any brains, you should just give up now!"

"Inari!" Tsunami snapped. "Don't be rude to our guests!"

She turned to the others. "I'm sorry. My husband - Inari's stepfather - died trying to protect our village from Gatō's mercenaries, and we still... feel his loss very keenly."

"That's right!" Inari wouldn't let up. "He tried to be a hero, but there's no such thing as heroes. If he hadn't done that, he'd still be alive. And now you're going to die trying to be heroes too!"

"Hey," Naruto started, "Now you're just being-"

"Shut up!" Inari cut him off. "I hate being surrounded by idiots like you! And I hate living like this! It wouldn't have to be like this if people didn't go around trying to be heroes!"

Naruto opened his mouth, but to his surprise, before he could say anything Sasuke beat him to it.

"Shut the hell up, you moron." Sasuke was apparently in no mood to mince words. "Did I just hear you dismiss your father dying fighting to protect your family? Did I just hear you dismiss the life your mother works hard every day, on her own, to provide you with? Who the hell do you think you are that you should have the right to judge them?

"You think your father's death is a free pass for you to act like a wimp your whole life? You think because he wasn't strong enough you can just throw in the towel and forget about his killer? Well, you don't get to do that.

"If you don't like something, work to change it. If you're not strong enough for that, get stronger first. If you've got an enemy you want to beat, man up and train until you're strong enough, even if it takes years. And don't you dare dismiss other people for trying to do what you're too much of a coward to, whether they make it or not."

The room was silent for a few seconds. Then Inari burst into tears and ran off.

Naruto's first thought was "well done, Sasuke, you just went off on one at a pre-schooler". But his second thought was "I'd have done it if you hadn't". There was something simply unforgiveable about someone taking their parents for granted like that.

The rest of the dinner was conducted in a subdued sort of silence.

-o-

The next day, Team Seven assembled at a grove of particularly tall trees not far from the village for what Kakashi termed tree walking exercises. He gave them a brief explanation of how they worked (push chakra out from the soles of your feet, not so little that you slide off, not so much that you fly away), as well as explaining the vast benefits this skill would deliver in terms of mobility and general chakra manipulation, and sent them out for a first try.

Sasuke's attempt was fairly impressive - he made his way halfway up his tree of choice before making a mark with a kunai and backflipping off.

Sakura's was nothing short of astounding - for all that they'd become used to her falling behind in actual combat, she casually strolled to the very top and then sat on the highest branch blowing raspberries at them. Apparently, her chakra control really was her strong point.

Now it was Naruto's turn. He started to run up the tree. Adjusting the levels of chakra in his feet seemed fairly trivial, on the same level of complexity as adjusting his grip to hold onto a moderately slippery bar of soap. Then, with a start, he realised that he was nearing the top, and thereby revealing his own enhanced chakra control skills. This called for emergency measures.

"Bwaargh!" Naruto "accidentally" channelled way too much chakra into his feet, and shot off the tree with the speed of greased lightning, nearly bowling Kakashi over before coming to rest upside down in a groove made by his head some way from the clearing.

Wow. That was actually pretty interesting. Naruto suddenly knew how skilled ninja managed to instantly accelerate the way they did. This would have some amazing taijutsu applications, to say nothing of his more... special... techniques.

Kakashi, meanwhile, just shook his head.

-o-

_Later that night..._

Naruto was in bed, just finishing up his reading (the team had patched things up with Inari, at least enough for Naruto to borrow some of Wave's intriguingly foreign manga from him), when he heard a knock on his door.

"Come in!"

Kakashi entered and closed the door firmly behind him. "Do you have a minute, Naruto?"

"Sure. What's up, Kakashi-sensei?"

"I see you're enjoying some manga," Kakashi observed. "I read some myself before the start of this mission. As it happens, Asuma's nephew has a full collection of _Ikazuchi Saga_."

Naruto tried to keep his expression blank. Oh, hell.

"Really? And what did you think?"

"I wanted to see the fight Sakura told me you got your Genin exam plan from. Funny thing - I couldn't find anything remotely similar in the whole series."

Naruto did his best to give an innocent shrug. "I must have been thinking of a different manga after all. I'm sure the title will come to me eventually."

Kakashi gave him a piercing look. "Naruto, do you mind if I tell you a bedtime story?"

Naruto was taken somewhat off guard by this. "Uh, sure, if you like."

"Back in the days of the Third Great Ninja War," Kakashi began, "there were two squad leaders whose mission success rates were far above those of any other. One was my master, Minato-sensei, and the-"

"Who was Minato-sensei?" Naruto interrupted. The name rang a bell, perhaps from one of those history lessons during which he did his best to appear asleep.

"Namikaze Minato, the Yellow Flash," Kakashi explained. "You know him as the Fourth Hokage."

"Whoa! You were trained by the Fourth himself?!" Kakashi-sensei's standing with Naruto suddenly rose astronomically.

Kakashi nodded. "Anyway, he was one of the top squad leaders. The other was a man whose foreign parents had given him an unpronounceable name we all shortened to 'Vash'. And he's the one I want to tell you about.

"Vash was a genius ninja - as you can see from the fact that he rivalled the future Fourth Hokage - but he hated responsibility and did everything he could to avoid it. So he worked hard to hide his true skill, to the point where even now most people haven't heard of him. Do you know what 'obfuscating stupidity' means?"

Naruto, panicking on the inside, carefully shook his head.

"It's when you act like an idiot to disguise the fact that you're actually very clever. Vash was a master of it. His squad would join battle, and he'd slip and fall, or trip over and grab random inappropriate things for balance, or throw a kunai and accidentally cut a rope holding up something heavy, and when his opponents stopped laughing they'd suddenly realise he'd obliterated half their squad without a scratch on him."

Naruto nodded. This sounded entirely like his kind of guy.

"But then one day his squad was caught in a large ambush by Hidden Rock troops. And Vash didn't know what to do. There were too many of them to fight with his usual pretend incompetence, but if he used his full strength and saved the day, he knew he'd shoot straight to the top of the candidate list for next Hokage, and everyone knew the Third was planning to retire once the war was over."

"So what did he do?" Naruto asked, dreading the answer.

"Nothing. His indecision lasted for entire seconds, and in a high-level shinobi battle, that can be a lifetime. By the time he made up his mind, it was too late. Rock had wiped out the rest of his squad. Of course, he then destroyed them at full power, but that didn't bring anyone back - not the specialists he needed to complete the mission, and not the teammates who had trusted him with their lives."

Naruto said nothing.

"Vash gave up being a ninja after the war, and disappeared completely. Some say he couldn't live with the guilt. Others think he's still out there, somewhere, trying to atone."

Kakashi held Naruto's gaze. "I'm not going to tell you how to live your life, Naruto. But if you want to be a good shinobi, you need to know what matters to you most, and what you're prepared to sacrifice for it. Think about it while there's still time."

Kakashi left.

Naruto didn't sleep that night.

-o-

In the morning, after breakfast, Naruto went to Kakashi, and very quietly asked him what the next step of training was after tree walking, and whether it was something he could do on his own.

Kakashi decided to send a clone with him to teach him, leaving the original to supervise Sasuke and Sakura (the latter having excellent technique, but currently using up more chakra in the process than someone with her low total could afford). Whether deliberately or by chance, he chose a distant clearing as the training site, one where no-one would ever stumble across Naruto by accident.

"Now, this exercise is called water walking," Kakashi told him. "Not only do you have to regulate the amount of chakra emitted from your feet, but you have to adjust it second by second to the outside environment until it becomes second nature. Normally you'd start out on a still surface like a lake, but time is limited and you need this weaponised by the time Tazuna is ready to resume construction work on the bridge next week."

Kakashi casually gestured towards the nearest source of water, which happened to be a raging river, deep and terrifyingly fast. An observer of an animist mindset would have had no hesitation in labelling it as a very angry river god hungering for violence and destruction, before running away as fast as their legs could carry them.

Naruto gave him a "you've got to be kidding me" look.

Kakashi shrugged, and calmly walked over the river to the other side as if strolling across a smooth stone floor. "Don't forget, when you fall in and start getting carried into the rapids, you can just use what you learned in tree walking to touch off the nearest static object and leap out to shore again."

Naruto noticed that he'd said "when" rather than "if", but there seemed no point in arguing.

"Thanks, Kakashi-sensei."

Kakashi nodded. "Keep at it for the rest of the day. Come back once it starts getting dark and I'll talk you through some basic tips if you're struggling - though it's always better to work these things out yourself if you can. And after dinner, we'll be working on anti-Zabuza strategy."

And that, apparently, was that.

-o-

Training sucked. Even with a few shadow clones doing the training alongside him, progress was slow and painful, moreso since the clones had a tendency to try to grab onto each other (and him) when falling, getting everyone wet. Naruto promised himself that once he could do Fire Element techniques like Sasuke, the first thing he'd do is learn (or invent) an instant clothes-drying ninjutsu.

Grumbling to himself, he dismissed the shadow clones and started to walk over to a convenient log on the other side of the clearing to take a break.

"Don't move!"

Naruto froze, his foot still in mid-air. Crapcrapcrap. Zabuza wasn't supposed to be active until next week at the earliest. Though there _was _his mysterious hunter-nin ally...

Naruto very slowly turned his head while keeping the rest of his body completely still.

The person he saw was not a ninja. It was, in fact, the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen in his life, with long black hair, large brown eyes, and a sleeveless pink kimono that went perfectly with her pale skin. She was also wearing a light brown choker that brought out her eyes. Looking at her, Naruto's heart actually skipped a beat.

"You were about to step on a valuable medicinal herb," she explained before moving towards him and plucking said herb from the ground beneath his frozen foot. "You can move now."

Naruto stepped down. "Uh, hi. You're gathering herbs?" What an unbelievably smooth first impression, his inner critic congratulated him. That eloquence trophy is surely on its way even as we speak.

The girl nodded. "My master's feeling sick, and I wanted to make some medicine to help him recover. This area is very good for medicinal herbs. What about you?"

"I'm Uzumaki Naruto, a mighty ninja!" Naruto announced, trying to recover from what he perceived as his earlier gaffe. "I'm out here training."

The girl smiled. "I'm Haku. Are you really a ninja? Is it true that you can fly and breathe fire?"

"I think you're thinking of dragons," Naruto told her. "I do know someone who can breathe fire, but he's a bit of a jerk."

She laughed. "So what are you training to do?"

"I'm learning to walk on water." Naruto wisely decided not to demonstrate, aware that falling into the river was unlikely to help him impress Haku.

"That's amazing! Can you show me?"

"Uhh... I'm actually just taking a break. So do you live around here?"

The girl hesitated, then nodded. "Sort of. My master and I used to travel the world before Gatō trapped everyone here."

"What does your master do?"

"Oh, he can do everything!" Haku said proudly.

An idea occurred to Naruto. "Hey, how about I help you out with gathering herbs, and in return you tell me some stories about your travels? This is actually my first time outside the Fire Country."

"But don't you need to train?"

Naruto shook his head. "Don't worry about it."

He summoned a few shadow clones and sent them to resume the training. Haku's jaw dropped.

"You can make more of yourself?!"

"It's no big deal," Naruto replied smugly, while trying his best to sound completely casual. "So what kind of herbs are we looking for?"

"For a start, more like this one. This is blue-eyed windwort - you can chew it as a mild painkiller, or powder it to help stimulate blood flow."

Naruto nodded. "Gotcha. All right, tell me a story."

"Well," Haku was deep in thought for a second. "There was this time when my master and I had signed on with a merchant bringing an order of unusually-shaped turnips to the Country of Tea. Unfortunately, right before we got to the Daimyō's court, the merchant fell ill with stomach flu, and he begged us to complete the deal for him. But what he forgot to tell us was that the Daimyō didn't want them for _eating_..."

-o-

"... and then my master says 'I don't know what _you_ think, but I swear that goat's horns were facing the other way last night!'"

"Bwahahaha!"

Naruto had been having so much fun listening to Haku that he barely noticed it was getting dark. He'd never wanted dinner less.

"Will you be gathering herbs here again tomorrow?" he asked.

"Maybe," Haku told him. "Will you be skiving off your training here again tomorrow?"

"Only if you help me," Naruto told her.

Haku laughed and gave a nod.

Naruto walked back to Tazuna's house in high spirits.

-o-

Dinner was a lively affair. Sasuke was sulking at being beaten by Sakura, Sakura was over the moon at finally having something she could impress Sasuke with, and Naruto was practically bouncing, and unsuccessfully trying to hide it. At one point, Kakashi and Tsunami both stared at him for a few seconds, then exchanged meaningful looks.

A few seconds later, Tsunami leaned over and whispered "local girl?" in Kakashi's ear.

"Almost certainly," Kakashi whispered back.

"What are you two whispering about over there?" Inari demanded. "I'm telling you now, I do not want a ninja as a stepdad!"

Tsunami blushed, while Kakashi's expression was entirely unreadable. Sakura, Naruto and even Sasuke laughed.

-o-

The next day, Naruto was making slow but sure progress (read: only falling in whenever he stopped paying 100% attention) when Haku turned up.

Today, he took more of an active role in conversation, partly at her insistence, telling her all about the life of a ninja (and the D-rank missions, including a number of anecdotes about That Accursed Cat), and about his friends, temperamental Sakura, wannabe genius Sasuke, curious but easily terrified Hinata and the others. Doing so brought into perspective that he actually did have more friends than he'd consciously realised. Haku was a natural listener, and he even found himself telling her about the others, people he wouldn't exactly describe as "friends", but whom he still cared about deeply: the Hokage, Teuchi and Ayame, Raijin, Iruka-sensei, and, he realised to his surprise, increasingly Kakashi-sensei too.

Haku sounded wistful when she questioned him about them. Apparently, her life on the road didn't leave her with opportunities to make friends. It was just her and her master - although it helped that he was the most incredible man ever, strong, wise, caring and generally incomparable in every way.

"Sounds like you're in love with him," Naruto teased her.

"Don't be silly," Haku told him. "My master's my master. He's not someone you love or hate. He's above all that. It would be like being in love with the whole world all at once."

"Oh, so he's your world, is he?"

"Yes," Haku nodded, completely seriously. "He is."

Naruto didn't have much he could say to that.

From there the conversation turned to what it was like to live in a ninja village, surrounded by other people, many of whom also had amazing supernatural abilities. Haku asked, for example, how you prevented crime in a village where everybody was an expert at being sneaky and covering up their tracks. Naruto had to explain about the village police, and how Leaf used to have a special clan, the Uchiha, whose Sharingan eyes allowed them to defeat even the deadliest ninja criminals. Unfortunately, this meant he also had to tell her about the Uchiha Massacre, and how one dark night Uchiha Itachi had wiped out his entire clan for no reason anyone could fathom, leaving only his little brother alive. Haku was deeply moved by the discovery that Naruto's friend ("no, no, the word is 'rival'") Sasuke was the last survivor of his clan.

Since she was looking upset, Naruto decided to quickly change the subject. He cast around for something to talk about, and recalled that yesterday she'd mentioned playing shogi as part of a ridiculous bet in the Country of Vegetables.

"So you like shogi, right? I do too."

Haku nodded. "I do. Do you have a favourite strategy?"

Naruto beamed. "Oh, sure. I'm a big fan of the Modified Dairin Defence, as long as your opponent isn't too big on sacrificial pawns, and the Mishima Cross has to be one of the best ways to shut down a bishop offensive _ever_, and-" he suddenly realised what he was saying. _This _is why he was supposed to watch what he was saying twice as carefully whenever he got excited. OK, so much for that budding friendship.

Then he realised to his surprise that Haku was staring at him with keen interest.

"I _hate_ the Mishima Cross," she announced. "My master gets me with it every time and I still haven't figured out a counter."

"Oh!" Naruto exclaimed. "Well, as long as you have a silver general and a few pawns handy, there's the Takeuchi Lance. It's expensive if you mess it up, but what you do is..."

-o-

Naruto was in heaven. Pure and absolute heaven. He had discovered the perfect woman. Apart from being beautiful and charming and intelligent and interesting, she actually took his intelligence to be a good thing. Inspired by the way the day had gone, he even made some very good suggestions during the nightly anti-Zabuza strategy meeting, like ways in which he could place his shadow clones on the bridge to prepare traps before the battle. It wasn't anything that could dramatically give away his intelligence, but it was still more than he would have had the courage to say before.

-o-

"You know," he told Haku, "it's not very safe travelling the roads all the time with just one man to protect you. How about I teach you a little self-defence to balance out all the herbal medicine you've taught me?"

Haku did not object. In fact, it struck Naruto, there was something more intense about her behaviour from the moment they started, as if she was soaking up information not just about how to do the moves, but about how _he_ was doing them. On impulse, he decided to try something... just in case.

The next technique he tried to teach her was not another standard self-defence technique. It was a highly advanced ANBU-level assassination move he had seen exactly once in his life, the night he'd carefully inserted a dozen clones disguised as pages into Kakashi-sensei's copy of Makeout Paradise. It was the page on which the name of Mikoto's real father was finally revealed, and Kakashi would open it and do a double-take at the name, only for the page to vanish in a puff of smoke and reveal a nearly-identical page - with a different name. Due to being too afraid of damaging a real page to try to destroy all the remaining clones at once, and too afraid of spoilers to try to flick past them, Kakashi had to suffer through all twelve iterations before reaching the real revelation.

While Naruto had not managed to learn the full technique, which required advanced chakra control and not being in extreme agony on the one time you were shown it, he knew enough to try teaching it to Haku and see what happened.

To his thoroughly concealed horror, she picked it up as effortlessly as all the others, without seeing any apparent difference.

Wave had no ninja village. All the foreign ninja living in Wave were old and retired, and Gatō's blockade prevented any new ones from coming in. Haku, who had been in close and blissful physical contact with him in the process of practising the self-defence moves, was not under the Disguise Technique. He now knew exactly who she was.

And even though she was clearly a highly skilled enemy ninja, and for all he knew everything she'd said and done so far had been an act, the fact was that he didn't want to have to kill her.

As they chatted about ninja village economics, and misbehaving clothiers from the Country of Wheat, and the pros and cons of the Hattori Gambit, Naruto hastily developed, analysed and dismissed plan after plan. Eventually, as the sun got low, he decided he had something with at least a small chance of working.

"Hey, Haku, are you busy tomorrow?"

The girl seemed puzzled. "No, pretty much like today. My master's getting better, but there are still a few medicines that he could do with."

"Then do you fancy... uh... going on a d-d-date?"

Haku stared at him. "A date? With me?"

"S-Sure," Naruto affirmed, while inwardly going "pleasepleaseplease let this work!" and also "help! What does one wear for a date?"

Haku let the silence stretch until Naruto was near panic. Finally she nodded. "Meet you here at the usual time?"

"Yes! I mean yes." And so his fate was sealed.

-o-

_Late that night, after everyone had gone to bed..._

Naruto knocked on the door.

"Uh, Tsunami, can I talk to you?"

"Naruto? Of course. Just give me a second."

There was a brief delay.

"Come in!"

Naruto came into the bedroom. Tsunami, in a green dressing gown, was waiting for him.

"What is it, Naruto?"

"Um... I know I don't know you very well, but I need advice, and it's not something I can ask anyone in my team..." Naruto admitted awkwardly.

Tsunami nodded sagely. "You want to know how to invite a girl on a date."

Naruto's eyes went wide at the uncanny guess. "Actually, she's already said yes. I want to know what you do on a date, and how. I really don't want to mess this up." Not when there were lives at stake.

"I see. Well, the first thing you need to do is look the part. What have you got apart from your uniform?"

"Uh... just these clothes I'm wearing now."

Tsunami shook her head. "No, that'll never do. How long do we have before the date?"

"It's tomorrow."

Tsunami looked at him. "Dear heavens."

"Right. Stand up. Arms out. Let's see if any of Kaiza's old things fit you."

-o-

"Arms up!"

-o-

"No, the colour's all wrong."

-o-

"Arms out."

-o-

"Sleeves are too long, but goes well with your eyes."

-o-

"Stop squirming!"

-o-

"Definitely not."

-o-

"Maybe if your hair was a bit darker."

-o-

"Oh, my, I didn't know he'd kept that. Oh, the way he looked in it when he danced..."

"Tsunami? Are you OK?"

-o-

That night, Naruto learned the unimaginable power a woman can unleash when guided by a higher purpose and wielding a sewing machine. He also memorised a list of nearby tourist locations, based on a very old guidebook Tsunami lent him. According to her, it had once been brought here by a visiting ninja tourist from far away, who had given the thing to her and proclaimed that her encyclopaedic knowledge of the area, as well as her surpassing beauty, made her a far superior guide. Inside the front cover, there was indeed a message reading "to Tsunami, from Jiraiya with love". Naruto also noticed that the book had various hot springs circled in red.

But there was only so much one could do to prepare, even armed with Tsunami's advice, support and promise of absolute secrecy no matter what. Naruto adjusted his black trousers and red jacket, took a deep breath and entered the clearing.

It was just as well he'd taken a deep breath, because it was suddenly caught in his lungs. Haku was wearing a black kimono with cherry blossom patterns that somehow managed to make her even more beautiful than she had been before. Her smile was even more radiant, though there seemed to be some subtle melancholy quality to it - or was that just his imagination now that he knew her to be an enemy?

"You look stunning," he told her when he could speak.

"I like the way you look too," she replied. "So where are we going?"

"Right this way."

-o-

Were he not keenly aware that Haku was an enemy ninja who would soon be trying to kill him and the rest of his team alongside Zabuza, it would perhaps have been the perfect date. He'd plotted a route down a riverside path leading to an old and beautiful temple, with an inn nearby that had largely escaped the ravaging of Wave's economy through exceptional self-sufficiency, and could thus offer an excellent meal in elegant surroundings. And after an initial shy silence, Naruto and Haku found themselves talking incessantly.

But the main event was still to come.

As Naruto led Haku to the western gate of the city he'd passed through before, he started to bring the conversation in the direction of Gatō and Wave's recent history. Then they went in, and Haku saw Wave's urban face.

Something about her expression hardened. She was pained, Naruto could tell, but not by the shock of discovering something terrible. Rather, it was something she'd seen before, and had hoped never to see again.

"This is what Gatō wants to preserve so he can keep getting rich off these people," he told her. "And it's also what the ninja he's hired, a guy named Zabuza, is fighting to protect. It's hard to believe, isn't it? That someone would lay their life on the line to keep starving children on the streets, to keep everyone miserable and scared?"

Haku said nothing.

Naruto kept her moving, down the streets he remembered being most impoverished on his first time through, using the maps he'd memorised from the guidebook to locate places of maximum impact, like ruined residential areas and closed hospitals.

"It bothers me," he told her. "I keep thinking that we might lose, and then the whole country will stay like this forever." He meant it. This was his first mission where something important was actually at stake, and this only made it more excruciating that suddenly he was having to weigh so many different things in the balance at once.

Haku still didn't say anything.

"So I keep telling myself that we have to win. We have to help these people beat Gatō, so they can have food and water, and shelter. And pride. That look in their eyes... I never want to see anyone looking like that.

"I guess that's why I brought you here," he told Haku. "Sorry, I know it's not great date material, but I wanted you to understand what I'm doing here, in this country, and why."

Haku managed a smile. "That's OK. I'm... I'm grateful you want to share something that matters to you with me."

Eventually, they left. There were a couple of other places Naruto had on his list, scenic locations that gave Haku plenty of space to think as they stared out at beautiful vistas together. He didn't get in her way.

As it grew dark, and they were on their way back, she turned to him. "Naruto, I want to thank you for today. It meant a lot to me to go on a date with you."

He smiled. "Yeah. To me too."

"Listen," she went on, "tomorrow is the last day I'm going to get to spend with you. My master's feeling better now, and we're going to move on from this place. So make sure you come, OK? There's something important I have to tell you."

His eyes widened a little.

She smiled, a little sadly. "Wait until tomorrow. Goodbye, Naruto."

And they parted ways.

-o-

It was early morning. In the process of performing miraculous feats of avoiding Tsunami lest she quiz him about the date, he'd had an idea, one last plan which almost certainly wouldn't work, and would probably lead to disaster somewhere down the line even if it did work, and would probably place him in terrible danger and not pay off at all, but it had to be done. And it had to be done now. Tazuna's itinerary had been drawn up, and starting tomorrow he'd be working on the bridge in person every day. And the bridge, a confined space surrounded by water, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, was where Zabuza would inevitably strike. Naruto dispatched six clones on a special mission.

Then he went and waited for Haku. Happily, his shadow clones had been working diligently, even during the date, so he pretty much had the water walking thing down now. The hard part had apparently been not just staying above the surface, but managing chakra flow in the horizontal plane to prevent the river sweeping him away like some sort of moving floor.

Haku came soon enough. "Hello, Naruto."

"Hi, Haku."

There was an awkward silence.

Naruto hated awkward silences. He'd been stuck in them his whole life, whenever somebody wanted to ignore him or get rid of him but couldn't quite figure out how. So he broke this one quickly.

"You know, you never did tell me the end of that story about your master, the ten jugs of pig grease and the panicking minister of foreign policy..."

And as Haku obliged, they fell back into the pattern of their previous conversations. Still, there was something between them now that hadn't been there before, and Naruto thought they were both aware of it. A certain tenderness, perhaps, combined with an unspoken sense of sorrow. They both knew that something precious was ending, and that it could not be protected or preserved. Even the brief time they'd had together was an illusion, a false peace between two people of whom one would inevitably have to kill the other. At least if Naruto failed.

Eventually, evening came, and then there was no more time.

"So what was it you wanted to tell me, Haku?"

Haku sighed. "Naruto, I'm not who I appear to be."

"I know," Naruto told her.

"You... do?"

"Your master is Zabuza, isn't he?"

Haku nodded. "But I don't want to fight you, Naruto. Please... stay out of the battle tomorrow. I don't want to have to kill you."

Naruto looked at her. "Are you really OK with this? Fighting for Gatō? To keep Wave as it is?"

Haku didn't say anything for a while. "I'm my master's tool. If he wants me to fight, I have to fight."

"Even if it's wrong?"

"You don't understand," Haku replied. "I owe my master everything. If he said the sky was green, I would do my best to live my life as if it was."

"But... but you're better than that!" Naruto exclaimed. "You're intelligent, and experienced, and capable of making good decisions! You can't lie to yourself just because someone else says so!"

"I owe him everything," Haku repeated. "Nothing I do will ever be enough to repay him, so I have to at least give him everything I can."

Naruto, having rehearsed this conversation extensively in lieu of sleep, decided to try another tack. "You know he'll die. My team is strong, and Kakashi-sensei is incredibly strong. You're not just letting him fight for the wrong cause. You're not just letting him kill for the wrong cause. You're letting him die for it."

Haku was silent.

Time passed.

"... I'll talk to him."

"What?"

"I'll talk to him," Haku said. "Maybe he'll listen."

Naruto felt a wave of relief.

"But Naruto, if he decides to fight, I have to be there at his side to protect him. It can't be any other way."

Naruto nodded helplessly. "And that goes for me too. I can't let any of my friends die."

"Then I guess that's it," Haku said with regret. "I want you to know that, even though I was trying to deceive you about who I was, I meant everything else. The time I've spent with you has been precious to me."

"Me too," Naruto told her. "You're the most amazing girl I've ever met."

Haku smiled. Then, completely unexpectedly, she stepped over to him and kissed him. It was warm, and gentle, and soft, and felt utterly incredible. He felt a little dizzy when she pulled away.

"Oh, by the way..." she added, "I'm a boy."

The dizziness suddenly intensified. Naruto attempted to make a considered response that would encapsulate all his feelings about this sudden revelation.

It came out as "bwuh?!"

Then he realised something. He wasn't feeling dizzy because he'd just discovered that he had had his first date, and his first kiss, with another boy. He was, in fact, feeling dizzy because Haku's lips had been poisoned. He hit the ground with a thud.

The last thing he saw was Haku dragging his body somewhere no-one would ever find it.


	8. Chapter 7

_A/N: Because the next chapter is fairly short, I'm uploading it together with this one as a bonus. Please be sure to read this chapter first._

_If you want a personal reply to a question in a review, please make an account so I can PM you, as I obviously have no way of contacting guest reviewers._

_I've decided to rule that the Sharingan does not let you bypass needing elemental affinities, both based on canon evidence and for reasons of logic/balancing._

_"Kyubey" is a joke from the original HPMOR omake chapter which inspired this fic. It's a pun on "Kyūbi" as in "Nine-Tails" and Kyubey the extremely intelligent and manipulative (and, at a stretch, fox-like) creature in the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica._

_Hunter-nin, as Naruto explained before, are specialist ninja dispatched to hunt down missing-nin, assassinate them and dispose of the bodies so that other ninja can't extract village secrets from them._

_Vash is indeed a Trigun reference. I've decided to keep references sparse, since to me excessive or unsubtle use of pop culture references wrecks suspension of disbelief, doubly so in settings which don't have access to real-world pop culture. I should also note that the name came after the character when I was planning, so it was a case of "might as well throw the name in as a bonus" rather than "let's shoehorn in a reference to one of my favourite characters as a plot point"._

-o-

"Nngk." Why was it so dark? And why did he have such a headache? Naruto staggered up and out of the middle of a thick clump of bushes, earning himself a few minor cuts and the eternal wrath of a hedgehog in the process. He had no idea where he was, although he had an inkling that this was somewhere near the route he and Haku had taken at the start of their date.

Haku. Gaah. She- er, he had poisoned him. It made perfect sense, as a final option after negotiations had failed, but it still hurt to think about. If it hadn't been for the Nine-Brains watching over his body...

Wait, he'd been unconscious. Oh, crap. That meant his clones had all popped. Dammit. He'd specially planned to use some of those all-nighter pills he'd borrowed way back when from Kiba (who had them for exam study purposes) in order to keep the clones in action overnight, but now he'd lost so much precious time.

As his muddled consciousness gradually sorted itself out, the clones' memories flooded back to him. Huh. He hadn't expected that. OK, the situation was still salvageable - just. His clones had worked very hard indeed yesterday, and some of what they'd discovered in the process gave him hope that this unexpected setback wasn't fatal. In a way, the unconsciousness had even helped, giving his brain time to process everything they'd learned and make it easy to draw conclusions on how to proceed.

He dispatched a new set of six clones. There was still hope as long as they could complete their mission in time. Wait, what _was_ the time?

Oh, crapcrapcrap. The sun was already high in the sky.

Naruto set off for the bridge at a dead sprint.

-o-

As he approached, he scanned the area, and he did not like what he saw.

At the far end, Kakashi-sensei was busy fighting Zabuza. He was clearly at a disadvantage. Zabuza was surrounded by water on all sides, which he could manipulate for many of his techniques rather than having to spend chakra on creating it from scratch. Kakashi-sensei had to worry about friendly fire at the fairly defenceless Sakura and Tazuna (though at least the battle appeared to have started before any of the other builders could arrive), and about minimising damage to the bridge, while Zabuza had no such compunctions. And to make things even worse, Zabuza was wearing some kind of sparkling visor, which kept reflecting light into Kakashi-sensei's eyes and stopped him being able to look at Zabuza's face.

Sakura and Tazuna, meanwhile, had sensibly taken cover between a couple of stacks of construction materials. This shielded them from random ranged attacks, and limited melee ones to frontal and aerial approaches, though at the cost of leaving them nowhere to dodge. Fortunately, Zabuza seemed intent on settling the score with Kakashi-sensei before worrying about completing his mission.

All, of this, however, was a picnic compared to what was happening on the near side of the bridge. Sasuke was trapped inside some incredible technique the likes of which Naruto had never even heard of - a dome made of floating person-sized mirrors of some translucent, ice-like substance. A masked figure in a loose green outfit whom Naruto immediately recognised as Haku kept flying between these mirrors at impossible speeds, throwing needles at Sasuke as she, er, he moved. Sasuke was looking increasingly like a human pincushion.

As Naruto's run brought him closer, he could just make out Sasuke's eyes. They had turned bright red, with the only other colours being the black of the pupil and two comma-like dots (he thought they were called "tomoe") around the edges. This was bad. Very bad. The Sharingan was popularly acknowledged as one of the most overpowered dōjutsu, and generally one of the most powerful Bloodline Limit abilities in existence. Even without the special techniques it enabled, Naruto knew that it allowed the user to see chakra, including seeing disguise techniques and non-shadow clones for what they were (which was a big part of why the Uchiha had been the village police), and to track enemy movements fractionally before they happened, making the Uchiha deadly taijutsu users. If Sasuke had managed to awaken his Sharingan and it still wasn't enough...

Just as he thought this, Sasuke collapsed.

As he came into range, Naruto spotted a gap between two mirrors up in the air, just large enough for a person to conceivably squeeze through. He made the hand seals. "Please don't work, please don't work, please don't work..."

It worked. Naruto was now inside the dome, and Sasuke was somewhere on the outside. This meant that, for the purposes of Substitution Technique consent, Sasuke presently counted as an inanimate object.

"Naruto?!" Haku exclaimed. "That's impossible! You should have been out for at least twenty-four hours!"

"Dammit, Haku!" Naruto shouted. "How dare you?!"

"I... I just wanted you to be safe..." Haku quietly said, grateful for the mask hiding his face.

"At what cost?! Did you think I'd just be OK with you killing my friends?! Multiple Shadow Clone Technique!"

Naruto put his hands together, but the instant his clones were fully formed, they were instantly pierced by needles through the heart.

"I'm sorry, Naruto," Haku told him. "Please don't resist. All I can do now is keep you inside my Demonic Mirrors of Ice Crystals until my master finishes the job. Once that's done, there'll be no more need for us to fight."

"No more need?!" Naruto was outraged. "You think we can be anything but enemies after you kill the people I care about? Multiple Shadow Clone Technique!"

This time, too, the clones were annihilated before they could so much as move.

"Then we'll be enemies," Haku replied. "But at least you'll still be alive. That's all I can do."

Dammit. Naruto urgently needed a strategy. He hadn't anticipated Haku being _this_ fast or precise with his attacks. At least the mirrors probably concealed their fight from the others, giving him freedom to use his special techniques.

Naruto quickly threw a series of kunai at Haku, then, in the same movement, made the seals.

"Multiple Shadow Clone Techni-"

He winced. Not only had Haku instantly dodged the kunai and moved to another mirror, but he'd also thrown a needle through Naruto's thigh, the slim piece of metal going all the way through and out of the other side while the pain disrupted his attempt to use his technique.

"Please don't fight me, Naruto. I know countless areas of your body where I can throw needles without doing permanent damage. I won't let you perform any more techniques."

Naruto was at a loss. Haku easily had the speed and precision to hit him as soon as he started making seals. He wasn't going to get back out now that Haku's attention was solidly on him, and in his haste to save Sasuke he'd neglected to leave extra shadow clones outside the dome.

So that was basically it. He couldn't use the Shadow Clone Technique (or for that matter the normal Clone Technique). He couldn't use the Substitution Technique. He couldn't use the Transformation Technique. He couldn't use taijutsu. He _could_ use tree walking, but there was nothing to walk on except the mirrors, and he was pretty sure Haku would knock him off the second he tried. And he didn't have any Uzumaki-style techniques that didn't rely on some combination of the above.

He was completely out of options. He'd never felt so frustrated at his own powerlessness before. Was _this_ the true face of genius ninja Uzumaki Naruto? He'd been so proud of himself, coming up with technique after technique that made the Academy basics look like children's toys, but in the end, was he just a wannabe doomed to be put in his place as soon as he finally met a _real_ ninja? Here he was, no more use than a civilian, and his team was going to die paying for his failure.

Except... except there was still the Final Option. He could ask the Nine-Brained Demon Fox for help.

He'd never done it before. He never wanted to. He didn't even know if it worked like that. And he was pretty sure that having people find out about the monster inside him, and watch him unleash it of his own free will, would put an end to his hopes of not being alone more surely than anything he could reveal about his intelligence. Assuming, of course, that he lived that long, and that the Nine-Brains didn't have the power to simply consume him if he was so foolish as to open its cage of his own free will.

He looked around, through the gaps in the mirrors. Somewhere in the distance, Kakashi-sensei was fighting for his life. Sakura was wide-eyed, trying desperately to control her breathing and not panic. Tazuna had his eyes open and watching the battlefield, but at the same time his hands were together and his lips were moving soundlessly. And Sasuke was probably dead, and would die of blood loss very soon even if he wasn't.

As Haku watched him silently, Naruto thought about a lot of things. He thought about Vash and the one mistake that had defined that man's life. He thought about the Hokage's rambling and ridiculously idealistic-sounding lectures about the Will of Fire which supposedly united the people of Leaf (though it apparently didn't unite them with Naruto). He thought about Haku's envy of the friends he hadn't entirely realised he had. He thought about the street children, and the adults with empty eyes. He thought about Hinata announcing her grand ambitions in a tiny, trembling voice. He thought about Kakashi, the adult, the team captain, who had told him to make his own choices.

Naruto closed his eyes.

-o-

With a click, a bookshelf rotated out of sight, to be replaced by another one. In front of it, a comfy armchair was illuminated by a gas lamp that gave just enough light for comfortable reading while shrouding the rest of the room in a gentle shadow. The lamp itself was suspended on an elaborate ironwork frame filled with abstract spiralling designs.

This was Naruto's mindscape, equal parts clockwork and library. It had started out as a simple visualisation technique, a mnemonic trick called _genius loci¸_ but then Naruto had got into a manga about an oracle who did most of his fighting in mindscapes. Now, greatly expanded with ideas borrowed from a variety of stories, this was the place where Naruto came to rest while other people just thought he was spacing out during particularly boring classes.

But he wasn't here to rest now. He was here for the one door he'd never dared open, a feature of his mindscape that he had not created, and did not understand.

He took a few steps forward. There were a couple of distant clicks, and then the floor he was standing on, in fact a giant gear covered with an elegant red carpet, rotated out, moving through a hazy blue void until it came to interlock with another. Here was where he'd found the door.

In size and shape, it was much like the other doors - not too large, not too small, a simple rectangle fitting perfectly in the middle of a gap between two bookshelves. However, it had no handle, and rather than being made of carved dark red wood, it was simply a solid slab of white. It was decorated with an abstract pattern of overlapping circular bands of every colour, like the first ripples of rain falling onto still water. They were too many to count, but they still left plenty of white space within them, so the door was as white as it was multicoloured.

Naruto had never dared go near it before, but now he walked right up to it. Nobody else would die like Sasuke. He wouldn't let them.

He put his hand on the door.

Suddenly, he was in utter darkness, with no sense of space, standing on a narrow circular platform that he knew rather than saw to be there. It was not what he'd expected. He thought he'd be seeing some kind of cage, or a shrine covered with seals, or at any rate some kind of mystical barrier with him on one side and the Demon Fox on the other. Instead, he felt very small, and very alone, with absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do next.

Then, before he could get his bearings, the eyes opened all at once.

They were all around him, far away but also vast, thousands of eyes of every colour watching him from every possible angle, even above and below. There was no hiding, no escape and no defence. Naruto screamed, stumbled and nearly fell off the platform into the endless abyss.

Something stopped him. A gentle golden glow seemed to provide some sort of forcefield that pushed against his back, keeping him on the platform, while at the same time illuminating its meagre one-metre diameter.

Naruto looked down. There were four bands of golden light around the edge of the platform, between him and the darkness. Inside each one, strange black symbols he did not recognise were moving very fast, clockwise in the even-numbered bands and counter-clockwise in the odd-numbered ones. This, he decided, must be the Fourth's seal.

He looked back up. The myriad eyes were watching him with cold, dispassionate interest. None of them blinked. Naruto felt very small indeed, like an insignificant insect trying to bargain for favours with a power infinitely beyond his comprehension, with only four narrow strips of light between him and a fate more terrifying than he could begin to imagine. Every last element of his being was screaming at him to flee at once, to push this place away to the most distant corners of his mind and to seal even the memory of it behind every psychic lock he could get his hands on.

But he'd made up his mind. It wouldn't just be him that paid the price if he failed here. "Hey, Kyubey!" he shouted into the darkness. "We're getting slaughtered out there! I know you want this body to stay alive as much as I do, so lend me your power!"

The eyes continued to gaze at him. There was no response.

-o-

As Naruto raised his hands for another doomed attempt at a technique, Haku flew out of his mirror and got ready to throw a needle. Then he saw something he couldn't comprehend.

Out of nowhere, a mask formed in front of Naruto's face. It wasn't that different to Haku's stolen hunter-nin mask at first, but then he saw it in full. It was a featureless white oval, with no special form - not even eye sockets - and a pattern of overlapping rings of colour that Haku had never seen before.

The development made Haku hesitate for just an instant, enough for Naruto to complete the seal. Suddenly, a shadow clone formed in front of and above Naruto. Its hands were already in the Shadow Clone Technique position. Without any delay whatsoever, it summoned another such clone in front of itself. That one summoned another. Before Haku could even react, and before even his ultra-fast movement could take him out of the way, the final shadow clone in the chain punched him in the face with staggering force.

Haku's mask shattered. He flew backwards at terrifying speed, his reaction time being just enough to dispel the ice mirrors before the impact of the one behind him broke his spine. He landed hard on the stone surface of the bridge.

"Naruto? What is this?!" Haku cried out in shock.

Naruto did not reply, and it occurred to Haku that perhaps this wasn't Naruto anymore. The masked figure's body language was completely different as it turned towards him, no hesitation and no wasted movement.

As Haku started to get up, the figure threw a kunai. Moving with his characteristic speed, Haku was able to get a kunai up to block, when there was a brief blur of motion, and suddenly the kunai was a five-metre long steel pipe heading straight for his face, with no time to dodge.

Slam! Zabuza somehow managed to stay on his feet as he absorbed the impact with his sword. Haku, now a few metres away, quickly reassessed the battlefield. His master had used the Substitution Technique on him, placing him out of danger. In theory, he should now have been facing Kakashi, but for some reason Kakashi wasn't attacking. He was running towards them instead.

Zabuza wasted no time.

"Water Element: Geyser Blade Technique!"

A thin, broad, high-pressure blade of water instantly erupted beneath the masked figure's feet.

Then, impossibly, the figure rose, standing on it as if it were any other body of water. There was no human with that level of chakra control. As the blade dissipated, it lowered itself back to the ground, its body language as expressionless as before.

"Truce!" Kakashi shouted.

"What?!" Zabuza turned to him.

"Truce! This thing easily has the power to kill us all!"

Even during that brief exchange, the figure had been busy. An enormous storm of shuriken flew towards the three ninja.

"Earth Element: Flowing Earth Wall!" Kakashi slammed his hands down on the ground, and a thick wall of brown stone rose in front of them just in time to block the first few shuriken.

Then the rest started to change direction to circumnavigate it.

Kakashi was stunned. His Sharingan eye had told him there were no chakra strings attached to the shuriken. It should not have been possible to manipulate them remotely. Then, watching the shuriken as they came round the edge, he very briefly saw it.

The shuriken's paths were intersecting as the Demon Fox kept throwing more, their blades briefly interlocking like clockwork gears and changing each other's direction. It required a level of timing and calculation beyond any living being - but the Nine-Brained Demon Fox had processing power to spare.

At the last second, Haku threw up a barrier of ice around them, deflecting the attack.

"What the hell have you brought here, Kakashi?" Zabuza demanded.

"That boy is the host for the Nine-Brained Demon Fox," Kakashi explained.

"The one that created the Leaf Crater where the old village used to be?" Zabuza asked incredulously.

Kakashi nodded, not wanting to waste time. It was true that the new Leaf Village was located inside the enormous crater left by the Nine-Brains' attack. They even used its highest wall to carve monuments to the Four Hokage, as a reminder to the villagers that, even in the face of the most terrible danger, they were being watched over and protected. But the Hokage wasn't here right now, and Kakashi was the only one standing between the Demon Fox and unimaginable destruction.

"I have a plan," he told the others, "but I'll need your help to keep it busy. Don't try to outsmart it, because you can't. Just overwhelm it with brute force so its attention is focused on us."

"All right," Zabuza grudgingly agreed. He did not fancy having Haku and himself at the heart of a new Wave Crater.

In one motion, Haku and Kakashi took down their barriers. The price of being able to talk without giving the Demon Fox a chance to see or hear them was that they hadn't been able to keep track of it either, and now it had had time to prepare. Kakashi quickly met Sakura's eyes, and her look of pure terror changed to one of terrified resolve. Then he began to fight.

The following battle was one of the most exhilarating experiences of Kakashi's life. Had it not been for his ability to keep track of chakra and super-fast movements with the Sharingan, Zabuza's near-limitless supply of water-based attacks, and Haku's amazing skill at improvising with the exceptionally flexible Ice Bloodline Limit, they wouldn't have lasted five seconds.

As it was, the battle was merely incredibly difficult. The Demon Fox had taken advantage of their discussion time to conceal shadow clones in pretty much every inch of the battlefield around them, and Kakashi half-suspected that they'd only had that much time at all because it was toying with them. The sheer brutality of its attacks, however, did not feel like a game at all.

-o-

The Demon Fox moved its head a couple of centimetres to the right to avoid a thrown kunai, not even bothering to expend the extra energy to block. The blade sailed harmlessly over the edge of the bridge.

"Water Element: Water Dragon's Explosive Bite!"

An enormous torrent of water surged up from beyond the edge of the bridge behind the Demon Fox, sweeping up the kunai as if it were a weightless leaf, and arced over the Fox's head, raining down piercing water bullets.

The Demon Fox dodged with precise, economical movements, moving systematically away as it did so. When the water suddenly took the shape of a furious dragon and slammed down on top of it, the Fox was ready to move out of the way before it landed.

"Ice Element: Snap Frost!"

The dragon instantly turned to ice in mid-fall, becoming sleeker and more aerodynamic as it did so, speeding up just enough that there was suddenly no time to dodge.

The Fox promptly thrust a kunai up at the dragon's maw at _exactly _the right angle, exploiting a series of imperfections in the crystal to cause the entire thing to shatter around it, reverting back to water as it landed in a heavy but completely harmless shower around its target.

With that original kunai still in it.

"Lightning Element: Thunderlash!"

The moment the dragon unfroze, a whip of lightning snapped out from Kakashi's hands, grounding itself through the kunai and electrifying the water.

Or so it should have been, but at the same time, a piece of rubble in between Kakashi and the Fox flickered through shadow clone form and turned into a tall metal spike, catching the whip and grounding it early (though being electrocuted into oblivion in the process).

Kakashi silently cursed. They'd been at this for over a minute, and the only reason they were still alive was that the Demon Fox was apparently limited to the techniques for which Naruto's chakra channels were already conditioned.

Even that last three-way combo had been accomplished while simultaneously fending off shadow clones from multiple different directions. The clones were taking full advantage of the Demon Fox's incredible casting speed, and the fact that it had no need to improve mental focus by calling its technique names out loud. In fact, it never made any sound at all.

More specifically, the clones kept using the Transformation Technique to instantly shift forms in mid-combat. It only took one good hit to destroy a shadow clone, but at the same time shadow clones took on the full properties of the objects they were transformed into. It was frustrating trying to impale an opponent, only for them to turn into solid steel plate just long enough to deflect your blow, or to prepare to block a kunai, only for the clone behind the one you were fighting to suddenly turn into a spear for its ally to wield.

And the teamwork... Whereas the three shinobi were all experienced warriors easily capable of reading each other's combat styles and adjusting to match, the shadow clones seemed to act as a single hive mind, for all that the Shadow Clone Technique simply did not work that way. Zabuza, Haku and Kakashi's only advantage was access to a wider variety of chakra-based techniques, and they were being forced to push it to new, extreme levels.

-o-

"Naruto, you imbecile, what the hell do you think you're playing at?!" Sasuke's voice suddenly broke through the silence of the chamber where Naruto had just asked the Nine-Brained Demon Fox for help.

"Bite me, greaseball," Naruto reflexively snapped. Then he looked up. "Wait, Sasuke? You're alive?!"

Then, as he started to listen, he noticed the other sounds beginning to filter through. It was pandemonium. There were claps of thunder, the sound of things shattering, screams and grunts of pain. At least one muffled "aargh!" clearly belonged to Kakashi-sensei. A sudden sense of horror dawned on Naruto.

"You can compress time in here, can't you?" he exclaimed. "All this time I've been waiting for your answer, you've been in control of my body."

There was no answer, and the only motion was that of his reflection in the bottomless depths of thousands of dark pupils.

"That was Kakashi-sensei screaming. You were supposed to give me the power to protect my friends, not try to kill them!"

Somehow, the silence of the chamber seemed to deepen, its counterpoint the distant, muted noise of the real world heard as if from deep underwater. Naruto began to understand how naive he'd been, trying to bargain with a vast, completely alien intelligence as if it were a rational partner seeking a mutually beneficial exchange. What it wanted, it simply took, and he'd opened the door for it to do so.

"Let me out! The deal is off!" Naruto shouted. "Give me back my body!"

He looked around desperately, but there was no escape. All around, there were just the Nine-Brained Demon Fox's eyes, and beyond them a darkness he never wanted to see illuminated.

He glanced down at the bands of light, his only allies in this insane space. He couldn't help noticing that the speed of the symbols in the outermost ring had slowed to a crawl, and its light was dim.

He knelt down, and placed his hands in the middle of the rings. "Please..." he whispered. "Please show me the way back."

And then there was a path. A narrow path of golden light, stretching into the distance to a familiar white door.

Naruto ran. The myriad eyes watched him go, never blinking.

-o-

As he regained access to his senses, Naruto saw Sakura standing in front of him, her body language tense with a fight-or-flight response ready to kick in.

"Oh, thank Heaven!" she exclaimed, relaxing slightly. "You're back!"

"What... happened?" Naruto asked. "And where's Sasuke?"

"Kakashi-sensei used his Sharingan to put me under a genjutsu," Sakura explained. "In the genjutsu, he told me to wait until that thing was completely focused on them, then use the Transformation Technique to turn into Sasuke and call out to you. He said if thinking Sasuke was dead made you lose control to the... the Nine-Brained Demon Fox, then maybe thinking he was alive would help you fight to get it back."

"Then he's..."

"He's alive!" Sakura told Naruto. "I heard him groan when I was preparing to turn into him. I think with his Sharingan he must have dodged just enough for all those needles to miss vital areas."

Naruto thought again about Haku's incredible speed, and wondered if the Sharingan had really been the only reason.

Meanwhile, on the other side, a bunch of white-masked shadow clones suddenly vanished.

"Truce over," Zabuza announced. "Haku, that thing broke my ice visor, so make one for yourself and take Kakashi. I'll eliminate the host boy and come join you."

"Yes, master," Haku responded helplessly.

-o-

"Uzumaki-style Ninjutsu: Deadly Doormat Technique!"

As Zabuza charged at Naruto, intending to lock him into taijutsu before the boy had time for any techniques, a column of shadow clones went into a slide at his feet, one after the other, each using the Transformation Technique to turn into a narrow slab of very smooth ice. Zabuza suddenly found himself sliding forwards uncontrollably, with each slab of ice reverting to clone form as soon as his feet were off it, and trying to stab him.

"Water Element: Reverse Water Prison Technique!"

Zabuza became completely surrounded by a sphere of water, including below his feet, allowing him to stop sliding, fall onto the current slab of ice with his full weight and shatter it. The fall brought him below the stabbing kunai, and he instantly dispelled the technique, taking out the clones with a single swing of his sword before they could do anything else.

"Uzumaki-style Ninjutsu: Loving Embrace Technique!"

As Zabuza rose, he suddenly found himself in the middle of a crowd of naked young women. He was not a man unfamiliar with the pleasures of the flesh, but the situation nevertheless surprised him for the split second it took for them to drape themselves all over him, shout "Transformation Technique!" and turn into intertwined bladed chains (exactly like the one wielded by the Demon Brothers). Zabuza was now unable to move without slicing himself into salad.

The missing-nin wasted no time. "Haku!"

Haku, busy in a kunai-on-kunai clash with Kakashi, quickly formed a few seals with his free hand, causing Kakashi's eyes to widen considerably. Zabuza stood perfectly still as a blast of ice spiked up from the ground around him, freezing the chains while leaving him unharmed.

With a mighty shrug, Zabuza shattered the frozen transformed clones, just in time to be able to block the new ones trying to cut his throat.

"Water Element: Water Bullet!"

Naruto dodged sideways to avoid the rapid blasts of high-pressure water.

But as he moved, Zabuza swapped with a piece of piping right next to Naruto's new location. Before the Genin could react, he'd been grabbed by the throat, and his head was moving towards the stone floor at extreme speeds.

"Shadow Clone Technique!"

At the last second, Naruto's momentum was softened by a pre-transformed shadow clone mattress. He just managed to tuck his head in enough to avoid doing horrible things to his neck, then quickly grabbed Zabuza and pulled him down into a reverse over-the-shoulder throw.

As Zabuza went down, Naruto used the momentum to keep going over him and off the mattress. And the second he was off, the mattress quickly turned into a clone, then, as Zabuza started to fall to the new lower height, into a bed of nails.

Zabuza, however, failed to be impaled. He calmly got up, completely unharmed, stretched, and picked up his sword again. "Haven't been on one of those since Genin training. Good times."

He noticed Naruto's look of stunned horror. "What? I'm sure to you water walking must be a big deal, but in the old Mist you were culled if you couldn't do it by the age of five. Now spike walking - that was at least an interesting challenge for a while."

Naruto backed away out of Zabuza's range.

"Well," Zabuza told him, "that was a nice warm-up. But how about you show me what you can really do? Or are you just another kid without the fox to do your fighting for you?"

Naruto risked a quick glance over in Kakashi-sensei's direction. The battle there seemed pretty even. Haku was scarily fast, but Kakashi-sensei had apparently fought very fast people before, and the experience advantage was a big deal when it came to things like setting up openings and taking advantage of the terrain. He was, for example, getting great mileage out of the fact that his Earth Element structures were permanent until destroyed or dispelled, and could easily reshape the battlefield, whereas Haku's ice required concentration to maintain, and was mainly being used for one-off attacks and barriers.

He couldn't slack off either. "Uzumaki-style Genjutsu: Void Prison!"

It took only a second before Zabuza cut through it with a single swipe of his sword. "Interesting idea. But I get the feeling you're still not taking me seriously. Water Element: Fist of the Water God!"

An enormous torrent of water rose over the edge of the bridge behind Zabuza and thrust itself in Naruto's direction. If it hadn't been for what he'd just learned about instant acceleration during tree walking training, and his exceptional chakra control, he'd never have got out of the way in time.

He charged back in, summoning a couple of shadow clones on the way. The three of them attacked Zabuza with everything they had. Zabuza quickly got rid of both clones with an elaborate set of chopping motions, but he was left having to briefly use his sword as a shield while he adjusted his stance.

Seeing his chance, Naruto tried to stab Zabuza through the hole in his sword, and Zabuza predictably re-angled the blade to turn the opening away from him.

This was when Naruto's wristband suddenly turned into a shadow clone. At the same time, a kunai lying on the ground behind it turned into a clone, leapt towards it, and turned into a chain in mid-air. The clone grabbed it as it flew into his hand, and guided it through the hole in the sword.

On the other side, another kunai turned into a clone at the same time, grabbing the chain's other end. Both clones sharply yanked the chain down, breaking Zabuza's guard.

Zabuza just had time to realise that the Void Prison's real purpose had been to lay down all these shadow clones without him noticing. Then the real Naruto's kunai met his stomach.

However, at the same time Zabuza's fist met Naruto's solar plexus. Unable to dodge, he instead hit Naruto so hard that the Genin flew backwards before his blade could penetrate. As Naruto caught himself, Zabuza sharply yanked his sword upwards, pulling the chain out of the clones' hands, and then cut through both in one sweep. As for the chain, he threw it towards Haku, who froze it in mid-air while trying to impale Kakashi with an ice spike using his other hand.

"Water Element: Water Clone Technique!"

Naruto froze. Where was the water clone? He couldn't see it anywhere. Last time, they'd turned up next to the caster, but Naruto didn't know how much leeway the technique gave. He had to-

Suddenly, he felt someone grab him roughly by the throat from behind, leaving him completely unable to breathe. And realised he was standing in the large pool of water left behind by the Fist of the Water God technique.

Before he could do anything, two more water clones grabbed his arms. Completely immobilised, he could only watch as Zabuza hefted his sword and charged in for a one-hit kill.

Naruto's life flashed before his eyes, a last look back at a world that had always hated him and sought to deny his existence. The few individual sparks of light he saw were set against a tapestry full of familiar, dark materials. Cruelty. Apathy. Contempt. After everything he'd been through, he had to ask: was he really so sad to go?

Finally, he reached the end of the flashback - and there, at the last second, brand new memories which changed everything.

The world had always laid down rules to make him suffer. He was the host of the Nine-Brained Demon Fox, so everyone had to hate him. People who were too different could not be tolerated, so he had to keep the most important parts of himself secret. And now, it had even made the rule that mission parameters could not be altered, on either side, so he had to die fighting his first love and the man at the heart of her- his world.

Well, not anymore. Naruto looked death in the eye... and grinned. Screw the rules, he had intelligence.

Every single shadow clone on the battlefield screamed three simple words at the top of his voice. "Gatō is dead!"

Zabuza stopped, his sword so close to completing its swing that Naruto could feel it drawing a line of blood. Out of the corner of his eye, he could also see Haku and Kakashi jump back out of each other's strike range.

"Explain. Now."

The water clone holding his throat slightly relaxed its grip.

"The shadow clones I sent to assassinate him just popped," Naruto told him as loudly as his aching throat would allow. "They did it. There's no-one to pay you for this mission anymore."

Zabuza narrowed his eyes. "You? Assassinate Gatō? Why should I believe you?"

Naruto described the memories his shadow clones had sent back of the man in as much detail as he could, his appearance, clothes, voice, his personal bodyguards, the way he'd begged for mercy - absolutely everything Zabuza could use to verify that Naruto wasn't making it up.

"I sent my clones on the assassination mission yesterday morning. It got messed up when Haku poisoned me, but luckily they'd had time to learn that Gatō had just come to Wave and was nearby. He'd brought a heck of a lot of mercenaries with him, too, almost as if he was planning to betray someone."

Zabuza frowned. "Haku, go to the location Naruto's described and check his story."

He looked back to Naruto. "If he takes too long, or if Kakashi makes one wrong move, the first thing I'll do is slit your throat."

Naruto tried and failed to nod.

Kakashi went off to administer first aid to Sasuke, under Zabuza's watchful eye, and the silence stretched on.

-o-

"Master, it's true! I had them show me the body!" Haku sounded like the happiest boy ever to return from a corpse viewing.

Zabuza sighed. "Great. We're broke again. I'm half tempted to kill you guys just for that, but Gatō was an asshole, and Haku's been trying to convince me you're the best thing since sliced bread, so maybe we'll call it quits for now."

Haku blushed.

"I've told the kid a thousand times that emotions and attachments are death to a ninja," Zabuza added, "but does he listen?"

Kakashi shook his head. "That's the younger generation for you. No respect for their elders. I don't know how we put up with them."

Zabuza turned to Naruto. "Listen, boy. You managed to find a solution where nobody we care about has to die, and this little country even gets its shot at salvation. I appreciate that."

Then his expression changed, subtly but terrifyingly.

"But if you ever cheat me out of my income again, I swear by the Sage of Six Paths that I will hunt you down and practise every one of the Hundred Tortures of the Bloody Mist on your still-living body."

Naruto swallowed. "Yessir. I mean no sir. I mean I promise I won't."

It was Haku's turn.

"Naruto, thank you. For everything. I don't have the words for how glad I am that we didn't have to kill you."

"Yeah," Naruto replied. "Same here. I don't even know how to tell you what meeting you has meant to me."

Haku smiled. "Fare well, Naruto. I doubt we'll ever meet again."

And before Naruto could say anything else, a blast of icy wind swept over the bridge. When it faded, Zabuza and Haku were gone.

In the silence they left behind, the only sound was Sakura muttering to herself. "Why do I always have to be surrounded by show-offs?"


	9. Chapter 8

A week passed before Sasuke was well enough to travel. During that week, he had been quiet and subdued, mostly staying in his room, and he hadn't said a single word to Naruto in particular. Naruto himself was unsure how to behave after everything that had happened. Kakashi-sensei, who as a member of the older generation had already known about the Nine-Brains, was still treating him normally, while Sakura was originally somewhat freaked out but seemed to be adjusting. The fact that she'd been the one to break him free of the Demon Fox's hold seemed to be a big deal to her, and he thought that victory helped her be a lot less scared of him than she might otherwise have been. Everyone else, who'd received a much less detailed account of the events at the bridge than Sasuke, treated Naruto like the rest of the team - as a great hero who had risked his life to save their country. It felt good, in a "help, why are all these people acting like they like me? It's freaking me out!" kind of way.

The mood in Wave as a whole was changing. After initial disbelief that Gatō was really gone, there was general jubilation. Even though change would be slow until the economy started to recover from the damage he'd done to it, there was already a sense of hope blooming among the people. In addition, although the bridge would not be ready to take proper traffic for months yet, there had been an official decision to hold the dedication ceremony today, in the evening, before the group responsible for its salvation set out on their journey home tomorrow.

In the meantime, everyone was free to spend their last day as they would. For Naruto, this meant a walk to a certain clearing, and along the route of his first date with Haku. He still couldn't quite get his head around the fact that Haku had turned out to be a boy, and had no idea what it meant, or what it said about him or anything else. Trying to figure out that part of him felt like looking into a black hole, and also a bit like it was disrespectful to the memory he had of his time with Haku to prod and poke at it with analytical tools. The one thing he knew was that he still hoped to see him again one day.

That and the fact that nobody else must ever know. He didn't expect anyone to understand (certainly not given how much difficulty he himself was having), and the best he could hope for from his friends, he suspected, would be endless and insensitive teasing. But somehow... that was OK too. It would be a secret for just the two of them.

-o-

"Hey, Sasuke, can I come in?"

"Inari? Yeah."

Inari looked at Sasuke, lying on top of his bed staring out of the window.

"Sasuke, I wanted to say... I'm sorry for what I said back then. You were right about everything."

Sasuke looked at him. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Inari nodded. "There are real heroes, and you're one of them, and I'm really glad I was wrong about you."

Sasuke didn't say anything for a bit.

"Were you?" he suddenly asked.

Inari gave him a look of incomprehension.

"I didn't do anything," Sasuke told him. "Even with these eyes, all I could do is get beaten up until somebody else bailed me out. If you want a hero, go look elsewhere."

"Weren't you the one who told me not to look down on people who were trying to do the right thing, even if they failed?"

Sasuke didn't have anything to say to that.

"You told me that if I was too weak, I should man up and train until I got stronger," Inari said. "And that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get stronger until I'm a hero like you. And then the next time someone threatens my country, I'll be strong enough to protect everyone."

"Man up and train, huh?" Sasuke echoed.

"You can do it, Sasuke!" Inari exclaimed. And then he ran off, his mission accomplished.

A few minutes later, Sasuke sighed, got up, and headed out to the woods.

-o-

_March 31st. Sunny._

_Dear Diary,_

_Sorry I haven't been writing. I kind of... dropped you behind the chest of drawers on my first day here, and only just found you again. Please don't hate me!_

_Hey, I just saw Sasuke leave the house. Yay! I've been worried about him all week - his injuries must have been so much worse than I thought if he hasn't even been able to leave his room. I bet he fought that Haku like a lion._

_Haku was weird. I swear he and Naruto had a "romantic moment" before he left. Only... he is a boy, right? And that sort of thing doesn't happen in real life, only in books and movies. And even if it did, Naruto doesn't swing that way. He's been asking me out for as long as I can remember. He'd better not think I'm boyish. I think I should hit him a few times just to be sure._

_Did I mention I saved everyone's lives last week? It's true! Kakashi-sensei used his Sharingan, and he was all like "you're the only one who can do this, Sakura", and I was like "leave it to me!" And then I snapped Naruto out of his weird demonic possession thing and everyone was like "wow, Sakura, you're the best. We're sorry we ever doubted you". OK, maybe they weren't, but they totally should've been._

_Anyway, tonight's the night of the big dedication ceremony. There's going to be dancing, and fireworks and stuff, and it's going to make the perfect first date for me and Sasuke. He hasn't said yes yet, but I just know he will! After all, I saved his life. That means we're meant to be together, right?_

-o-

"And then the west wing is going to extend over here, and we can have guest rooms over there, and a conservatory there, and if we split up those..."

Tazuna was waving his arms and pointing to random features of the landscape near the family home, while Tsunami was looking on in bemusement.

"But Dad, what are we going to do with all that extra space?"

"You'll need it when you've got your husband, and lots of children running around all over the place," Tazuna explained matter-of-factly. "And then I'll certainly want some room to myself without them getting under my feet."

"Husband?" Tsunami queried. "Even if I was going to remarry, I don't have my eye on anyone right now."

"What, you mean you're not done seducing that ninja fellow yet?" Tazuna asked in surprise. "Well, hurry up, girl, before he buggers off!"

Tsunami blushed. "Dad! We're not like that."

Tazuna wagged his finger admonishingly. "You're missing a golden chance there, Tsunami. Men like him don't come along every day. But anyway, I was thinking we could have a courtyard branching off there..."

-o-

It was the early evening, still light, and most of the population of the entire Country of the Wave appeared to be gathered in front of the platform erected in front of the Wave end of the as-yet-unnamed bridge. There was a suggestions box nearby with "ideas for bridge names" written on it.

"... and now, it is time for the speech from Team Seven, without whom this bridge would not exist right now. Captain Hatake, would you please grace us with a few words?" the official in charge of the ceremony asked.

Kakashi tried to look happy at the honour, while inwardly panicking. No-one had warned him he would have to make a speech in front of an entire country. Or at all. Ever. Big emotional inspirational speeches were what he kept Gai around for.

"Um... yes, well, of course, that is..."

"Kakashi-sensei, would you mind if I said something?"

"Go ahead, Naruto!" It was, perhaps, the most enthusiastic anyone had ever heard the man sound about anything.

Naruto took centre stage, and took a deep breath. He'd been preparing for this. And even though the only people present to whom it might matter already knew, and none of the rest were even going to pick up on how different this would sound from the Naruto up until now, it still felt like coming out at long last.

"People of the Country of the Wave! My name is Uzumaki Naruto, and I would like to say a few words about courage. When I came to Wave, I'd heard a lot about its beauty, its culture, its once and future wealth. But I had not heard about its courage. The courage of the bridge-builders who risked their lives as they worked day after day. The courage of everyone who gathered the goods for reopening trade with the outside world, giving up everything they had for a brighter future. The courage of Tazuna and those who helped him take his journey, even knowing that discovery would bring a tyrant's rage down on them. And, just as importantly, the courage of you, the people, who lived for years under Gatō's oppression, in unimaginable poverty and suffering, without ever giving up hope.

"I know suffering. I know how tempting it is to give in, to stop trying to live and instead just try to survive. And I salute the great courage you showed in continuing to live, and hope, day after day.

"Your courage is what inspired me and my fellow ninja to fight the way we did. It kept us going, no matter what Gatō tried to throw at us. And it's inspired me to dream in a way I'd never dreamt before. I'm going to become the Hokage, the champion and protector of the Hidden Village of Leaf, and I'm going to be the greatest Hokage in history! I will live up to the standard of courage you've displayed, and I will not be beaten by even the strongest enemy, just as you refused to be beaten by Gatō and his minions."

The applause was uproarious.

-o-

As Team Seven walked down to the site of the main festivities, watching the first Gatō effigies being lit up in the distance, Sakura leaned over towards Naruto. "Laying it on a bit thick back there, weren't you?"

Naruto shrugged. "It's what they needed to hear. Tazuna's bridge is going to give them back their prosperity, but they also need to regain their pride." He noticed that his register had shot up once again from excitement, but, just this once, he didn't try to restrain it.

"So, Hokage, huh?" Kakashi said. "Does that mean you've decided to work hard to make everyone in the village acknowledge you?"

"Acknowledge me? Screw that!" Naruto laughed. "They've long since forfeited the right to have me care about their opinions. No, I'm going to become a Hokage the likes of which the world has never known. I'm going to protect them, and save their lives, over and over and over again. And the innocent will merely be grateful to me... and the guilty will live every moment of their lives knowing that they owe everything they have to the man they hated and tried to break.

"That," he told them, "is how Uzumaki Naruto does revenge."

And Team Seven walked down towards the sounds of singing and dancing, leaving the Bridge of Courage behind them.


	10. Chapter 9

_A/N: Thanks for your support, everyone. Remember, reviews are the lifeblood which flows through the veins of a fanfiction writer._

_Today, I have the grave misfortune of updating at the same time as Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (once again, __unconditionally_ recommended to one and all), which is an experience not unlike being a new physics PhD graduate trying to present at a conference alongside Hawking, Einstein and Feynman. (It's a little-known fact that Stephen Hawking knows Edo Tensei.)

_Also, fair warning: due to a variety of minor bad things, I've been writing slowly over the last couple of weeks, and have burned through my chapter buffer. There is a small chance that I won't be able to get the next chapter (which is giving me a lot of trouble) out in time for next Monday._

_02/07/01: Updated for minor gender issues - thanks, Traiden!_

_Also, a reminder that I am presently following the anime rather than the manga, so **please avoid manga spoilers** in your reviews._

-o-

"That concludes my report," Kakashi told the Third Hokage, painfully aware that the sun had just set, and that the rest of the day was probably a write-off after the tiring journey. "You can find additional details in the written version."

The Hokage nodded. He'd suspected he might regret letting Naruto loose on the unsuspecting wider world, but the boy had truly surpassed his expectations. In just a few short weeks, he'd managed to defeat a Jōnin, unleash and re-imprison an eldritch horror, win a brewing civil war (if that was the right term for Gatō's inevitable conflict with the mercenaries Wave was going to hire) before it had even begun, and alter Leaf's status in the Country of the Wave's eyes from "favoured trading partner" to "land of invincible heavenly saviours". Even with Kakashi's help, that was quite the first C-rank mission.

"Thank you, you three. You are dismissed. Naruto, please stay behind."

Sakura, Sasuke and Kakashi bowed and left. Naruto mentally moved his plans forward. This wasn't a confrontation he'd intended to have just yet, but sometimes you just had to play the hand you were dealt.

"What do you want to talk about, old man?"

"Naruto," the Third leaned forward, "I need you to tell me everything about your experience with the Nine-Brained Demon Fox. Everything. Even the things you didn't tell Kakashi."

"What things I didn't tell... oh, screw it." Naruto was tired after a long day of travel followed by what felt like many hours of standing there supplementing Kakashi's report, and didn't feel like playing games. "I'm going to make you a deal. I'll tell you everything if you tell me everything."

"What do you mean?" the Hokage frowned.

"About the Demon Fox, and my parents, and what really happened twelve years ago. I think it's long past time I knew." This was it. He'd practised this conversation a hundred times, following all the ways it might go, all the different points of leverage he could use. He couldn't screw this up, or it might be years before he got another chance.

The Hokage, too, had practised this conversation, or ones not too different, more times than he cared to think about. "Did it not occur to you," he asked, "that there might be very good reasons for you to remain ignorant of certain matters?"

Naruto nodded. "Yes, it did. I know I'm young, and just a Genin, and between my general ignorance and my low security clearance there's a lot of stuff you feel you can't trust me with. And if I thought this secrecy was your independent judgment, I might even try to respect it."

He took a deep breath.

"But this whole scenario is just too stupid. What kind of idiot puts an indiscriminate, uncontrollable superweapon inside a child and just hopes nobody notices? What kind of idiot then lets everybody and their dog bully that child, eroding his loyalty to the village when he can destroy it in the blink of an eye? And let's not even talk about turning a highly valuable yet completely defenceless child into a social pariah whom, forget protecting, half the village would _kill_ if they were prepared to get their own hands dirty and thought they could get away with it. Frankly, it's a miracle I've made it this far without being kidnapped or assassinated by enemy agents, or made to meet with an unfortunate accident by a local.

"They call you the Professor, the most intelligent ninja Leaf's ever known. There is no way you're stupid enough to have set this situation up yourself, which means someone else overruled you."

The Third controlled his expression carefully, while reeling on the inside. Was this really the same Naruto who spent all his time playing pranks and reading manga? The indefatigable but ultimately somewhat simple boy who took disastrous exam scores almost as badges of pride, and invested all his cunning in surprising people and finding ever new ways to draw attention? Just what had happened to him in Wave, that he should suddenly talk like this, throwing the Third's own failed arguments from twelve years ago right back in his face?

"You've always been caught in the middle between good and evil, haven't you?" Naruto asked rhetorically. "You erased my parents' names from my birth certificate, changed the date, told me their deaths were part of a mission so secret you weren't even allowed to say who they were. Then you gave me my mother's name anyway."

The Hokage nodded mutely. It had been the only thing he managed to get a compromise on, and that had only been because if the child had to be hated so much, then no family would consent to him sharing their name, and a name with no other bearers would scarcely be less conspicuous to anyone knowing what to look for. Time had shown that people were perfectly happy to assume the boy some distant relative, taken in as a refugee much the same way Kushina herself had been.

Naruto went on. "You let the villagers hate me, but you yourself were always kind to me, even though you should have been too busy and important to ever talk to some random boy. You let the Academy instructors screw up my education, but when you noticed Iruka-sensei treating me like a person, if a very bad one, you talked to him, and whatever it is you said made a huge difference."

How had Naruto even known about that last one, the Third wondered. Heck, how had he known any of it? This wasn't just some sudden transformation. This was something more. Had he - and everyone else - been underestimating the boy all along?

Naruto, meanwhile, wasn't enjoying what he was doing. It was true, every word, but he could see the effect his words were having on the Hokage, and he hated the idea that people could be reduced to something like this, with pressable buttons and predictable effects. Or at least people he cared about, who treated him as a human being and deserved the same in return. But he hadn't forgotten Kakashi-sensei's words. Some things were just too important, and he had to be prepared to make sacrifices for them. Perhaps, he reflected, the path of the ninja really was making him sacrifice his innocence - just not in the way Morino-sensei had meant.

"This is your time to make a choice," he told the older and wiser shinobi. "You can stay stuck in the middle, not evil enough to do what everyone else is doing, but not good enough to do what's right. Or you can help me. There are things I need to know, and the longer I go without knowing them, the more likely things are to go horribly wrong. You've just seen that you can't protect me, least of all from the consequences of my own decisions. And if I am to make the right decisions, I need to base them on the truth."

The Hokage sighed, completely outplayed. Naruto was apparently a natural at emotional manipulation, and the fact that he was using it as a tool, consciously or unconsciously, did not make his words any less accurate. Perhaps he should have been fighting back, using all the power of insight at his disposal to cut through Naruto's reasoning and put the boy back in his place. But the fact remained that somewhere, deep down, he wanted the absolution that came from finally being honest about at least a few things, wanted to be able to face Minato's shade with the beginnings of a clear conscience.

"I suppose there's no chance of going for total containment at this stage anyway," he told Naruto. "Not with Zabuza, Tazuna and this Haku boy all knowing about the Demon Fox." He lit his pipe with an air of resignation, preparing for twelve years of conspiracy to go up in smoke and needing that extra bit of familiar routine to help ground himself for what was to come. "Very well. But first, tell me what happened."

Naruto described his experiences in as much detail as he could. It was rather uncomfortable to talk about his mindscape with someone for the first time, and frankly painful to have to relive his first contact with the Nine-Brained Demon Fox, a being equal parts the terrifying mystery of darkness and the unbearable horror of that which should not be seen. He struggled to explain in words the experience of being in its presence, of that merciless, dispassionate, silent attention directed at him from every angle. It was like being in a huge crowd of people at some popular event, and suddenly discovering that every single one of those people was there for the sole purpose of observing you, and had been focusing their attention exclusively on you _all along_, and watching them turn their heads to look at you _all at the same time_, never blinking.

No, even that didn't describe it. It was that moment of shock, frozen in time, merged with the helpless horror of the vivisection table and the desperate prayer to go unnoticed by a being so vast that it would crush you simply because that was easier than the alternative. Naruto still saw those eyes in his dreams sometimes, and didn't know if they were born of his imagination or if they had followed him back from inside the Fox's prison.

The Hokage listened without interrupting. Inside him, a guardian's compassion warred with a scientist's professional detachment, both sides insisting that theirs was the only wise and ethical way to respond to Naruto's account.

"I'm sorry you had to experience that, Naruto", he finally told him. "The price paid by a demon host is high, and you never asked to pay it. Now lift up your shirt."

"What?"

"Lift up your shirt. I need to see the seal."

Naruto obeyed. The Hokage put his hand on the boy's stomach. Immediately, a black pattern appeared, four concentric circles of elaborate intertwined seals around the navel, the outermost slightly paler than the rest.

"He wrought well," the Hokage commented. "It's as flawless as the day it was made. At least we don't have to worry about the Fox breaking loose of its own will."

Naruto nodded. "Good. Now I believe you have some answers for me."

"Yes," the Hokage sighed. "I suppose I do. Your mother, as it seems you know, was Uzumaki Kushina, a refugee from the Hidden Village of Whirling Tides. She was also the previous host for the Nine-Brained Demon Fox."

"And my father?"

The Third braced himself. He had not been looking forward to this part. "Your father... was Namikaze Minato, the Fourth Hokage."

He looked up, expecting shouting, slamming of hands on tables, or at least a flat "what." He would even have tolerated a small amount of violence being inflicted upon his person, though it was important for the sake of discipline that some lines remain uncrossed. Instead, Naruto was completely silent.

"My father... was the Fourth Hokage."

"Yes."

Naruto didn't even know where to start with this. He literally didn't. He felt like his brain had been completely locked up by the revelation. There were too many implications. He couldn't process them all. Or any of them. As soon as he started on one, his thought process was disrupted by another.

"I know this is a lot to take in, Naruto. Don't try to figure it all out at once," the Third advised him. He was starting to update his perspective on Naruto, who was clearly much more intelligent, and much less... uncomplicated than he'd appeared to be. Suddenly, the Hokage could see Naruto's parents in him in a way he never could before, however hard he'd tried. Minato's razor-edged intelligence, so sharp he had a tendency to cut himself, and Kushina's undeflectable angry passion... Naruto wasn't his parents, but thinking of them helped the old man know how to deal with him.

"I'm going to tell you the story in order. It should answer many of your questions. The rest we can talk about at the end."

Naruto nodded.

"Your parents met when they were young, not much older than you. Their relationship was... unique, in many ways. Your mother was strong-willed, short-tempered, fiery. She told me once, much later on, that keeping that intense core of fire going inside her was what helped her cope with the strain of containing the Nine-Brains - if her thoughts and feelings were rapid, intense, moving in straight lines, it was that much harder for them to be influenced or corrupted. You have to understand, her seal was very different from yours. She only had limited protection from the Demon Fox's corrosive influence."

Naruto wanted to ask about this, but had already agreed to wait.

"As for your father... have you ever heard the term 'Yamato Nadeshiko'?"

"What."

That was more like it, the Hokage thought to himself with some amusement.

"You're telling me the Fourth Hokage, my father, was the epitome of traditional virtuous femininity," Naruto stated in the same flat, disbelieving voice.

"In a manner of speaking," the Hokage smiled. "If Kushina was like fire, then he was like flowing water. He was soft, gentle, quick to laugh or to forgive, patient and slow to anger. He always looked out for others, and had a deep sense of responsibility. And at the same time, he had an inner core of steel, a courage and strength that allowed him to fight for the village and ultimately become its greatest protector."

"My father was a Yamato Nadeshiko," Naruto thought. "This is why you don't screw with old people's feelings. They've got the experience to screw with you right back. I'm not going to be able to get that image out of my head for months."

"Their relationship was complicated," the Hokage continued. "They were friends, rivals, enemies and just about everything else before they became lovers. Always, though, they seemed to complete each other in a way no-one else could, water to keep the flames from roaring out of control, and fire to light the way through mist and fog."

The feelings Naruto was experiencing as he listened were not ones he was familiar with. It's not like he'd never wondered about his parents before, or even daydreamed about meeting them - they weren't really dead, they were just on an extreme deep cover mission, or they'd been taken prisoner and finally escaped, or someone had invented a resurrection ninjutsu that could bring them back to life - but this sort of bittersweet longing was new to him, like he was finally finding out what he was missing, and that made things both better and worse.

"However," the Third went on, oblivious to Naruto's inner turmoil, or perhaps simply knowing that it was beyond his power to heal, "there is a fundamental law regarding female demon hosts. The first time a host gives birth to a child, the process temporarily weakens the seal. This is an incomparably perfect time for any enemy of the village to strike, attempting to steal or at least release the Demon Beast. Thus, every precaution is taken to keep the childbirth secret - to the point of concealing the relationship itself until the child is born and the danger is past. If no-one has any reason to expect a pregnancy, it is that much easier to hide it. Kushina knew this, and kept her relationship with Minato absolutely secret from the public."

The Hokage was right. This was filling in a lot of blanks. Naruto really wanted for him to slow down, to tell him more about his parents - what they were like, what they did with their lives, down to every last detail - but at the same time he knew that there was a more urgent need to understand exactly what had happened to them, and why. There would be time to get more details later on.

"Unfortunately, it would seem that in this case it wasn't enough. We still don't know what happened, because of course those who could tell us did not survive, but something or someone struck at the moment of childbirth and unleashed the Nine-Brains on Leaf."

Naruto's eyes widened. Then... it really hadn't just been a natural disaster. There was someone responsible for... well, everything. Someone who would be forced to answer for their crimes, if it was the last thing Naruto did.

"The destruction was unimaginable," the Hokage told him, his eyes focused on some point long ago. "The old village was wiped off the map. Countless people died. The Leaf you know was rebuilt, slowly and painstakingly, to take advantage of the natural concealment and defence offered by the crater the Demon Fox's attack left behind. And your parents were the only reason its onslaught had stopped at all."

"What do you mean?"

"Even before the Night of Tragedy, Minato had been conducting sealcrafting research in order to develop a superior seal to contain the Demon Fox. He was a prodigy, and the latest in a line of great shinobi to attempt the task."

For a second, the Hokage heard another voice, from an earlier time still. "Sarutobi-sensei," a pale young man had exclaimed, bursting into his office last thing at night, "I've finally figured it out! My updated cursed seal theory is going to blow Jiraiya's ill-conceived dabblings right out of the water! Just listen to this..."

With a regretful smile, the Hokage returned to his story.

"The work was tremendously important, because a human being is not inherently capable of fighting a free Demon Beast. Their intelligence is simply on a different level, capable of performing what we would consider miracles of prediction and calculation. Our only salvation is that it is also somewhat alien in nature - they are not creative the way we would expect a human of such genius to be creative, and just as they can accomplish feats far beyond even theoretical human comprehension, there are times where they appear to make mistakes a human in their position would not.

"Unfortunately, when the Fourth Hokage faced the Nine-Brains, his work was not yet complete. Nor could he seal the Demon Fox as the First Hokage had done before him, through the power of a Bloodline Limit. Instead, he was forced to resort to one of the most advanced forbidden techniques, the Moment of Clarity."

The Hokage paused to refill his pipe. The tobacco was unusually bitter tonight.

"The Moment of Clarity temporarily unlocks a human being's complete mental potential, enough to enable them to function on the same level as one of the Demon Beasts. He used it to instantly complete his research, and apply it to seal the Demon Fox into you. We call his work the Perfect Seal, and after twelve years we still barely understand what it is he did."

"What happened then?"

"He perished," the Hokage told him. "The human body can't operate at that level of function for more than a few seconds - that is why it's a forbidden technique. I'm afraid we still don't know exactly what happened to your mother - we speculate that her sacrifice was part of the power source that allowed him to create the Perfect Seal in the first place."

Naruto nodded, feeling his throat seize up. It wasn't fair, hearing all this, hearing about his parents' deaths, like it was something in a history book, long ago and far away. Gone, filed away, too late to be undone, for further information please see the index. Why couldn't he have known them, or at least had memories of them, something that would make the world in which they were alive a real place?

"Why me?" he asked the obvious question.

"I don't know," the Hokage admitted. "Only they could tell you that. But it isn't hard to understand. Minato was about to die. Kushina could not accept a new seal on top of her recently broken one. You were their son, and they believed you could accept that power and wield it for the greater good. Perhaps they even thought it would protect you."

"Protect me?" Naruto echoed incredulously.

The Third looked down. They hadn't known that he would fail them the way he did. They couldn't have expected the scale of the power shift. With his protégé gone and his credibility as protector of the village at an all-time low, he'd had to struggle to retain even a minimum of influence over events in the immediate aftermath of the Night of Tragedy.

"I know. It did the exact opposite. And you're right - I am to blame for that. Others insisted that we had to keep your identity secret to stop enemies of the village coming after you while you were young and defenceless. I told them that it was better for you to be known as the child of heroes, to have the loyalty and support of everyone in the village, but they argued..."

He stopped. He could see fate branching out in two different directions before him, depending on whether he told the full truth or the partial truth. The partial truth would probably have been better, for Naruto and for the world... but the old man couldn't do it. He'd had twelve years of concealing the truth, trying to soften it, even for himself. The chance to finally let go, to confess and accept judgment, was too much for him to resist.

"... they argued that a weak, broken child would make a better tool, easier to control when the time finally came."

And that had been it. The argument the Hokage hadn't fought against hard enough, the betrayal of all his beliefs that he had just allowed to happen because... because he hadn't had the influence to fight his opponents head-on? Because he'd still been reeling from the loss of so much that he'd loved, and couldn't bear to endanger what was left by provoking a major conflict at the time when the village was most vulnerable? Because his liberal, humanistic teachings had failed to protect the village in its hour of need, and he could no longer trust that his way was definitely better? They were excuses, one and all, and he'd spent twelve years asking himself whether he'd just been a coward, afraid to risk everything simply to do what was right.

He came out of his thoughts to realise that Naruto was still silent. Eerily silent. Silent as if time itself had stopped, frozen and ready to shatter. Silent to the point where the Hokage felt the need to fill the silence no matter what.

"But they were wrong about you. You were Minato and Kushina's son, and I watched you defy your destiny, over and over again. I know it may not seem like much, but I did what I could to help you. I kept you independent, and out of the hands of those who would shape your upbringing as they did with many of the orphans of that night. I saw the proof of your unbreakable spirit in your pranks, and never let them accuse you without incontrovertible proof, even when there was no-one else it could possibly be, and kept you from many of the punishments they-"

"Who are they?" Naruto interrupted in an icy-cold voice. "Who made those decisions about me?"

The Hokage shook his head. "I can't tell you that. Even ignoring the matter of confidentiality... you have to understand, Naruto. There are some enemies you can't fight. Enemies you shouldn't even _have_ to fight. You're twelve years old."

Naruto's eyes flared. The Hokage instantly knew he'd said the wrong thing.

"Am I too young to have feelings? Too young to be hurt? Too young to seek revenge?"

"Yes!" The Hokage snapped.

Naruto shrank back, suddenly reminded that he was talking to one of the most powerful ninja in the world.

"Listen, Naruto," the Third said, his voice stern. "I have seen many fine shinobi ruined by the path of vengeance. It is a vice greater and more dangerous than alcohol, or money, or lust. It will throw you against enemies too powerful for you to fight, and force you to sacrifice everything you hold dear for even a tiny chance at victory. And even if you do win, all you will be left with is the taste of ashes. I am not saying this to you as an authority figure preaching morality. I am saying it as an old man who has seen countless mistakes, and made countless mistakes, and knows what it looks like when somebody is about to make a truly terrible one."

Naruto didn't say anything for a while.

"You understand that I can't just let this go, don't you?" he finally asked. "I can't know that everything I've been through in my life is the result of someone's deliberate decision, and just forgive that person or forget they exist. Even if my own vengeance didn't matter, the kind of person who would break a child to turn them into a better tool isn't someone I can allow to live in the same world as me."

The Hokage sighed yet again. "I understand. And the side which you far too generously called 'good' earlier is not so overflowing with champions that it can afford to turn one away. But it's not time yet. No matter whether you seek justice or vengeance, you are not ready yet to fight these battles without losing either your life or your humanity. Please believe me as one who has seen too much loss of both."

"... I understand." Naruto didn't, not yet, but he at least knew that there was too much he still needed to get his head around. He wasn't ready to make any decision yet about what he'd heard today. If there was anything he needed right now, it was to go home and think. Think until the world made sense once again.

"Just one more thing," he added. "What about Raijin? Did he really die on a secret mission, or did he 'die on a secret mission' like my parents did?"

The Hokage looked pained for a second. In a voice forced into evenness, he told him "I'm sorry; I can't answer that question."

"What? Why not?"

"Or that one. I know it's frustrating, Naruto, and I know you deserve better, but I really have told you everything I can for now." And he was already starting to question whether he had just doomed Leaf Village and/or the world by giving the volatile pre-teen wielder of the world's single greatest destructive force information that could only make him more volatile still.

Naruto fought down the anger trying to break free inside him. There were plenty of other emotions trying to do the same; it could get in line.

"I think I've heard enough for now," he told the Hokage. "I need to go."

As he got up and opened the door, the Hokage called out to him. "Naruto... I'm sorry."

Naruto nodded, softly and without compassion. "I know."


	11. Chapter 10

_A/N: Sorry for the delay. Between real-life events and general lack of inspiration, this chapter has been a nightmare to write even though I've known for a long time exactly what it would be about. On the plus side, it's come out at twice what I consider normal chapter length. Please accept this by way of apology.  
_

_The anime, my sole source for Naruto canon, has just reached the point where the super-powered Naruto clones reach the various battlefronts, and Madara turns up and starts fighting. Please avoid storyline spoilers beyond this point. I guess I'd better make occasional mention of where the anime has progressed to in future authors' notes from now on._

_I've just come back from a week-long literary translation summer school, during which it was incidentally revealed to me just how incredibly far I have to go in terms of writing style. (Fellow student: "And I had to translate this incredibly awful text where the author actually does X and Y, I mean, can you believe it?" Me: "Wait, *I* do X and Y all the time in my writing!"). While most of this chapter was written before that point, fairly warned be ye that I'm going to try to experiment more in the future in order to improve. Obviously, constructive criticism would help a lot._

_If you have any questions you wish answered, and I have failed to do so, please remind me. It's been too long since the last chapter._

_Since my creative whatchamacallit seems to be at a low point, I'm going to play it safe and reduce update frequency to fortnightly and see how it goes._

-o-

Naruto was not the only one to sleep badly that night. When he got home, Kakashi had tried to go straight to sleep, but his troubled mind insisted on getting in the way. Team Seven had barely survived their first serious mission, and the responsibility lay squarely at his feet.

Yet again, he reviewed the course of events. First contact with the enemy had gone smoothly - their first challenging battle, and their first kill, had taken place in a highly controlled environment, moreso than they would ever know. But then he'd made the decision to press on with the mission instead of putting it on hold until reinforcements could arrive. He'd put the mission ahead of the welfare of his subordinates, and the very next day, they nearly paid for it with their lives.

Yes, they were the best Genin group he'd seen for years. They understood teamwork. They understood loyalty. They were self-reliant yet respectful of authority (at least when it counted). And for all their lack of experience, they were both disciplined and creative in their approach to new challenges, a combination far too rare even among skilled shinobi. But he'd thrown them into danger before they were ready, and simultaneously fallen for Zabuza's stratagem hook, line and sinker. He should have known then to turn back, to accept the loss of face from changing his mind and disrupting Tazuna's schedule.

And then there was the training. He should have focused on drawing out Sasuke's combat potential, tried to awaken his Sharingan and taught him the basic applications. He should have taught Sakura a simple technique or two to help her keep the client (and herself) out of harm's way. Instead... tree walking. In what possible world was tree walking a good idea against _that_ opponent on _that_ terrain?

No, in retrospect he knew why he'd done it. It had nothing to do with tree walking being vital preparation for more advanced training. First and foremost, tree walking enhanced mobility. On its own, what it boosted most was evasion and escape. He'd been ready to put his team into deadly danger, but not ready to trust them to fight. On some level, he'd hoped they would focus on staying alive, maybe even flee the battle, just so he wouldn't have to bury them as he had buried other teams before them.

At least Naruto had learned water walking, though in the event he hadn't had to use it. Kakashi still wasn't sure if his intervention where Naruto was concerned had been a good thing or not - it may or may not have ultimately saved the day, but it also nearly ended up unleashing the most powerful destructive force known to man. Was encouraging Naruto to draw on his full potential really a good thing, or had he just put the whole shinobi world in danger by trying to act on wisdom he didn't really have?

Kakashi sighed to himself. There was still so much to do if he was to make up for his failure and be the instructor these children deserved. The flame burning inside Sasuke threatened to consume him if fanned in the wrong direction. Sakura was strolling blithely into a world that chewed up the unprepared like a meat grinder. And Naruto reminded him of his younger self, gifted, brilliant, and utterly unable to see beyond himself to the true consequences of his actions.

In the early morning, Kakashi finally drifted off to sleep.

He was awakened a couple of hours later by a quiet noise, so faint he might almost have thought he'd dreamed it.

Within a second, three shinobi lay unconscious on the floor, and a fourth was struggling with his right arm behind his back and a kunai at his throat. Kakashi fixed the remaining, fifth, intruder with a cool gaze.

"How can I help you, gentlemen?"

The other man was unfazed. He took in the state of his subordinates with a quick glance, reached slowly into a vest pocket, and presented a scroll with an official-looking seal at the bottom.

"Hatake Kakashi, you are hereby under arrest on suspicion of treason against the village of Hidden Leaf. Your trial begins in an hour."

-o-

Naruto's mood had not improved by the time he woke up. He could feel something ending, some faint wisp of childhood he hadn't even realised was there. In a way, he should have known this would be the case. The ninja world wasn't like the civilian one, where some sort of mystical process magically rendered a person ready for adult life overnight, based on their biological age. Here, the rights and responsibilities of adulthood were aligned with those of being a ninja: as a Genin, he was expected to sacrifice his life for the village at a moment's notice, and accordingly had the right to live that life as he saw fit. There were restrictions, of course, given the young age of most Genin. Some rights were reserved for their parents or guardians, and Naruto would not attain them until he reached Chūnin rank or the age of sixteen (whichever came first).

In his case, though, attaining Genin rank hadn't been as big a step as for most people. With the Hokage's hands-off approach to guardianship, Naruto had already been making his own decisions on most day-to-day matters, while other privileges of adulthood (such as marriage) felt too far off to even think about. As such, he hadn't felt the seismic shift of becoming a partial adult, and hadn't realised that his life was changing forever. Now, at last, that feeling was catching up to him. In the space of one mission, he'd experienced first love, fought to the death, and had to make major decisions about his place in the world. Then, in its aftermath, he'd discovered that he was caught up in a web of secrets and dangers that most adults would never even have to deal with. Who would he become if he kept going like this? Was he expected to give up being playful, flippant and carefree (or at least as carefree as Naruto got)? What did it mean to grow up, to adapt, and which parts of it was he allowed to choose?

It was too much for Naruto to deal with all at once, and he found himself casting about for a suitable distraction. He finally found it in an unexpected place. At first, the big practical decisions that had to be made in light of his conversation with the Hokage had felt like towering monoliths ready to topple and crush him under their weight at any moment. But now, Naruto was taking shelter in their shadow. There was a certain comfort in having to face puzzles where he could bring all his intellectual might to bear, looking for a solution he knew he would eventually find, rather than nebulous philosophical issues he had no idea how to grasp.

At the top of the list were the revelations about his parents. It was tempting, so tempting, to throw the truth in the villagers' faces, to savour their shame as they discovered that they'd been tormenting the son of one of their greatest heroes. But his fantasies of revenge popped like soap bubbles when he tried to actually project the most likely scenario. Would they really admit they'd been wrong all along, and face up to the consequences of their actions? Or would they just spin the discovery to reinforce their existing beliefs, and proclaim that he was an obvious disappointment to his parents, who would surely be ashamed if they could see how their son had grown up et cetera et cetera? Naruto had no illusions that the villagers had originally decided to hate him based on some sort of rational evidence that could be challenged and disproved.

Then there was the safety angle. Much though he hated to agree with his mysterious nemesis about anything, if Naruto could work out that he was Kyubey's host, so could others, and every extra detail made him easier to identify. If he was going to reveal the truth, and one day he certainly was, it would have to be after he became strong enough to fend off that sort of attention. His experience with Zabuza and Haku had taught him the limits of his strength all too well, and the people coming after him would probably include enemies of their calibre. Not to mention whoever had unleashed the Nine-Brains in the first place. From the Hokage's words, it seemed like no suspicious bodies had been recovered, which suggested that someone powerful enough to penetrate maximum village security, face off against the Fourth Hokage and break a state-of-the-art demon seal was still alive and out there - and likely interested in finishing the job.

There were too many pieces of the puzzle missing, that was the problem. What was it they were all after? His nemesis had wanted to use him as a tool, but Naruto's experience with the Nine-Brains had shown it to be far too dangerous to just unleash as some sort of weapon of mass destruction. It was an intelligent being, and clearly one with a taste for violence. That meant it was fully capable of seeking revenge on its former captors, or indeed pursuing its own plans, which were unlikely to be for anyone's good. It wasn't worth keeping something like that around if the only way to make use of it was to let it loose and risk either of those things happening. It would be smarter to just kill Naruto, or keep him in some kind of hidden underground vault his whole life until the time came to transfer the Nine-Brains to his successor.

That meant there had to be something else, some benefit to being the host of which he was as yet unaware, and which might just tip the balance of power in his favour. His parents had probably thought so too when they'd chosen their own newborn child to receive the seal. And, knowing this, they'd entrusted him with it; they'd assumed, without even knowing him, that he would do the right thing when given great power. The very notion of that sort of trust, something he had never seen in the real world, filled him with a strange mix of emotions, from sorrow to happiness, from awe to disbelief. He wished again that he could have known them. For now, questioning the Hokage about every last detail of their lives would have to do.

Feeling a bit better, Naruto roused himself from his contemplative state. Things were changing, after all, and one of those changes was the fact that his wallet was presently full of more money than he had ever even seen in one place before. In other words, it was time to go shopping.

-o-

The chief of the (civilian) Leaf police service stared gloomily at the reports mounting into an ever taller pile on his desk as he waited for his latest intern to bring him a much-needed mug of coffee.

At 9.45 am, a hulking purple-skinned horned ogre, wearing a tiger-skin loincloth and waving a five-foot iron club, had barged into the foyer of Scroll Off, Leaf's premier bookshop, and demanded directions to the manga section from a terrified clerk. It returned to the counter ten minutes later, its body language much changed, and very quietly handed over the money for the two most recent volumes of _Princess Maker Gaiden_, five volumes of _Thorns and Petals: Rosamund's Heart-Pounding Adventure_ and the entire backlog of the critically-acclaimed _Magical Girl Glitter Honey_.

At 11 am, the chief's intern informed him of a new rumour spreading like wildfire: apparently, Tora, the Fire Daimyō's wife's cat with a tendency to take refuge from its owner on Leaf territory, had been cursed to turn into a dog when covered in water at precisely 4 degrees Celsius. To date, Tora had been drenched with at least seven buckets of cold water by curious townsfolk, but to no effect. Trade in thermoses and thermometers was apparently booming.

At 11.30 am, a report came in of a mass nosebleed-induced fainting incident among the staff of LUSCO supermarket. Allegedly, a group of completely naked young women, their modesty preserved only by mysterious clouds of mist, had marched in, completely unembarrassed, and purchased a variety of cooking implements, as well as industrial quantities of ramen ingredients. When questioned on their way out, they explained that they were preparing a dark ritual to summon their master, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, from the void beyond time and space for purposes best left unspecified.

By that point, the chief had no choice but to accept that the worst had come to pass. Uzumaki Naruto was back in town.

-o-

Naruto strolled cheerfully through the streets, catching up on his shopping needs while a separate corner of his mind gleefully noted the visible consequences of his opening salvo of pranks and made notes for future improvements. Naruto had yet to realise this, but his daily use of shadow clones was in fact making him a lot better at semi-conscious multi-tasking. He also faintly registered the Hokage passing him by at one point, unusually out of his characteristic white robes and ridiculous hat, but the latter completely blanked him. Naruto wasn't sure how he felt about that, but just as he was beginning to consider the implications, he was distracted by the sight of Kiba and Shino walking down the street.

They were the first people he knew that he'd seen since he got back, the Hokage and a bunch of scowling shopkeepers notwithstanding, and the sight shocked him out of his reverie. This was it, his chance to establish a new pattern of behaviour that didn't completely conceal his intelligence, yet also didn't freak people out and make them run away. He wished he'd spent more time planning, maybe running through the various paths such a conversation could take and considering appropriate responses, like he had with his confrontation with the Hokage. Still, he had to start somewhere, and an ordinary casual encounter with a couple of fellow Genin seemed like just the thing.

"Hi, guys! I'm back!" Naruto waved.

The response was not what he expected.

Shino and Kiba's heads turned to Naruto in eerie unison. They stared at him as, in one voice, they intoned "we are members of Team Kurenai. You hurt our Hinata. Prepare to die."

Naruto froze as they started to advance towards him. He had not anticipated his fellow ninja being mysteriously replaced by some sort of evil zombie clones. While he reckoned he could take Kiba in combat without much difficulty, and Akamaru could be dealt with one way or another, he simply didn't know enough about Shino's capabilities or fighting style to take the risk of fighting him in a three-on-one match-up. Naruto had read about the effects of rare toxins, and did not need telling that there were few things more terrifying than an opponent with a precise, long-range, potentially silent and invisible chemical delivery system.

As such, he didn't waste any time. "I don't know what you're talking about! I never did anything to her! I haven't even been here!"

"Hinata's been moping ever since the day you left," Kiba told him in an accusing tone of voice. "She's barely said a word in the past two months, and we know it's your fault!"

"Why?" Shino elaborated. "Because her demeanour changed after she read that note you asked me to pass on to her."

Naruto could feel a heavy sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. What could he have done that was horrible enough to make Hinata upset for two solid months? His imagination, ever helpful, conjured images of a sad Hinata lying curled up on top of her bed, looking very small and helpless in the middle of the enormous four-poster monstrosity (which Naruto assumed every Hyūga had in their bedroom); Hinata trying to write in her diary, only for the ink to be blurred by her falling tears; Hinata at dinner, unable to muster an appetite, and brushing away the concerned questions of her household (who would doubtless be swearing Blood Oaths of Vengeance against whatever transgressor had so hurt her)...

Naruto flinched away from the visions, and forced himself to consider the much more tractable question of what he could possibly have done wrong. As far as he could remember, his note to Hinata had been completely innocent. What had he written again?

-o-

_Dear Hinata,_

_Sorry, but I won't be able to have dinner with you after all. Don't take it the wrong way - it's not you, it's me. I've just received an urgent mission, and I have to take off straight away. I don't know when I'll be back. It's probably just as well - after seeing so much of each other over the last couple of months, maybe we need a break. You should take this time to see other people, and pick up more conventional ninja tips, while I could use some space so I can figure out where to go from here._

_Naruto_

-o-

Either way, there was only one thing for it.

"If she's upset, I should talk to her," Naruto told Kiba and Shino. "Where is she?"

"Nuh-uh," Kiba shook his head. "You've done enough damage. You're going to stay here and take your punishment for not listening to our warning."

He rolled up his sleeves demonstratively. Akamaru growled. Shino didn't move, but the light happened to catch his sunglasses, making them glint in a particularly sinister fashion. Was that a faint buzzing sound, just on the edge of hearing?

"Wait! I'm prepared to negotiate!" Naruto shouted.

Seeing that he'd at least momentarily put them off balance, he pressed on. "Kiba, I know a shop which is selling _Pagoda of the Dead 3_, the one they nearly banned for graphic content, without asking for ID. I'll tell you where it is if you let me go see Hinata."

Some of the tension faded from Kiba's body language, and he lowered his fists just a little. Akamaru looked up at him in puzzlement.

Shino gave his teammate a reproachful look. "Don't give in, Kiba. This is a test of the loyalty of the pack, of the unity of the hive. You cannot abandon your own for the sake of such trifles and still call yourself a shinobi."

"Damn straight!" Kiba agreed, his resolve restored. "You know, every once in a while, you actually say some good stuff. Now let's get on with the beating."

"You know that girl who helps out at the flower shop down the road from the Academy?" Naruto quickly asked Shino before the group's anger could regain its momentum. "I can tell you where and on which days she has lunch on her own, plus three of her favourite topics of conversation."

"Hinata is at the Namikaze Memorial Library," Shino immediately informed him. "If you hurry, you should be able to get there before it closes."

Naruto created a shadow clone to hold up his end of the bargain, then grinned and ran off. When he'd asked Iruka-sensei in his circumlocutory fashion why information warfare wasn't taught at the Academy, he'd been told that it was too difficult a concept for mere Genin-in-training. In reality, he suspected, it was because it was such a powerful tool, and one so easily turned upon even the mightiest Academy instructor.

-o-

The Namikaze Memorial Library was a tall, elegant building founded during the second wave of reconstruction after the Night of Tragedy, once housing and basic infrastructure had been re-established and there was a need for Leaf to prove both to itself and to the outside world that it had not ceased to exist as a major shinobi power. A lot of favours had been called in, and a lot of uneven trades made, and the most obvious consequence was some very impressive civic architecture for a settlement coming back from the edge of annihilation.

With his new information, the whole thing made much more sense to Naruto. He'd already known that the village had extremely thorough evacuation plans (as a Genin, he was obliged to know levels 1 to 3 off by heart, while Chūnin were drilled in the full set). If the Hokage and his most trusted staff had known in advance that the Nine-Brains might break free that night, he could see how they managed to save so many people from an event that had literally wiped the physical structure of the village off the map. Leaf's revival may have seemed like a miracle to the outside world, but the whole thing was a product of sound planning, between the evacuation that had left countless people alive but temporarily without a trade, the First Hokage's decision to found the original village in a vast forest that provided endless construction materials, and a highly sensible long-term investment policy (which would never again be decried for forging unnecessary financial bonds with potential future enemies).

The Namikaze (the very name made Naruto's heart skip a beat) was a tribute to the Fourth Hokage in more than just its name. Its specialisation was higher education - the fact that ninja were forced to finish their formal education at the age of twelve, and thereafter had to focus on mission-related specialisations, had been an endless source of frustration for the Fourth, who in another life would happily have been a scientific polymath. The Third had thus decided that the library would stock titles suited to self-study in a variety of topics, both civilian and shinobi, from agriculture and Bloodline Limits to Yin/Yang elemental polarisation and zoology, with a tiered access structure preventing ordinary villagers from being exposed to things they were better off not knowing.

Naruto's own attitude to self-study had always been decidedly mixed. On the one hand, he knew well what it was like to hunger for information, especially when those around him were all too happy to deny it to him. There was pleasure in satisfying his curiosity, and in adding more pieces to the enormous jigsaw puzzle that was his understanding of the world around him. On the other hand, every new piece of knowledge just left him more isolated. What he knew could not become a topic of conversation, could never even be mentioned in front of others. The more he learned, the further away he moved from his peers, in intellectual advancement but also in isolation. There was a whole new kind of loneliness in having a head filled with ideas that could never be shared.

That was due to change, though. He had an objective now, one which called for him to take full advantage of his strengths. If learning was one of his strengths, which it most definitely was, then he would have to leverage it as much as he could, and find a way to bring his conflicting desires into balance. He had no idea exactly how that could work right now, but he remembered his conversations with Haku, and however distant the prize, he now knew it was worth fighting for.

Unfortunately, even if he could do that, in the case of the Namikaze Memorial Library one significant obstacle remained. Head Librarian Ishihara Kaori, aka "Old Stoneface", was a woman who hero-worshipped the Fourth, perhaps moreso than anyone else in the village, and her hatred for the monster that had killed him was as intense as it got. Even after Naruto became a Genin and Ishihara could no longer keep him banned from the premises as a "disruptive element" without consequences, she'd managed to keep the boy from using any of the institution's resources with a variety of tricks refined over decades of library management. At the moment, as far as Naruto could tell, the odds of his membership application form ever getting processed were roughly equal to the odds of Sasuke suddenly growing wings and flying away.

At any rate, Shino had not led him astray. Hinata was indeed inside, leafing through a large black book with improbable speed, her expression of concentration at once fierce and oddly adorable. Naruto was put in mind of a small, fluffy kitten trying to intimidate an intruder into leaving its territory.

"N-Naruto! You're back!" She looked up and gave him a somewhat dazed stare as he approached. Her Byakugan deactivated.

"Um... yeah. Got back last night. Hey, listen, I just talked to Kiba and-"

A heavy seal (of the book-stamping variety, not the space-time warping variety) suddenly zoomed right past Naruto's ear.

"Silence in the library!" An enraged librarian admonished in a loud voice, likely disrupting far more people's reading than Naruto and Hinata's conversation had been.

"Sorry..." Hinata whispered, even though Naruto was technically the one being rebuked.

"Let's go outside," Naruto suggested. Hinata nodded and put the book away.

Once out of range of the librarian's vengeance, he spoke up again. "I'm really sorry."

Hinata looked at him blankly. "You... are?"

"Yes. I'm not exactly sure what it is I did," Naruto told her, "but I'm sorry anyway."

"Um." Hinata's heart started to beat faster. There was no protocol she was aware of that would tell her how to handle this, no easy social guidelines to make things smooth and straightforward. There was just a question she needed answered, and there was absolutely no way for that to happen, much as she wanted one, except to ask it.

"Naruto... what exactly did you mean by your note?"

"What do you mean?" Naruto asked. "I meant exactly what it said. An urgent mission came up and I had to leave straight away, so I was putting off that thank-you dinner. But I know you can take things a bit personally sometimes, so I also said you shouldn't worry about it, since taking a break would just mean we had more energy to start training again once I got back."

"Oh." For a second, Hinata looked enormously relieved, as if some huge weight had been lifted off her shoulders. Then she suddenly looked pained, as if said weight had been put back down squarely on her foot. Naruto dimly recognised the body language of Hinata's standard I-am-beating-myself-up-because-I-am-an-idiot mode, on this occasion with subtle extra flavours he couldn't quite identify.

"Why, what did you think I meant?" Naruto asked with more than a little bemusement. "I bumped into Kiba and Shino, and they said you've been upset ever since you read it."

Hinata squirmed, as if suppressing an impulse to get away. "I thought it meant... something else. Or I did at first, anyway."

"Did you change your mind?" Naruto asked, noting the non-answer but also knowing that trying to pressure Hinata never led anywhere good, and in fact was pretty much the most counter-productive thing one could do with her. If pushed, she would retreat into herself and grow increasingly upset and non-responsive. If pushed further, she would flee. The one thing she did not do - and, in an odd way, Naruto respected her for this - was give in to the pressure and change her mind on the issue in question.

"Not... exactly," Hinata answered. "But I started to think that maybe dealing with things that way was... out of character for you. I know that sounds strange, but I feel like if there was something wrong, seriously wrong, you'd be more open and direct about it. Only... the more I thought about it, the less sure I was what to think. I didn't want to be one of those girls from the stories who jumps to the wrong conclusion about the boy, and then does something stupid, and they both end up committing suicide, or getting their hearts broken, or she becomes the Demon King's masked lieutenant and the hero has to kill her to save the world..."

Heavens above, just what did she think he'd written?

"I knew," Hinata continued, "that I needed to figure out what you really meant, and I had to do it before you got back. But I simply didn't know how to get from the things I knew to a conclusion I could be confident in. I tried to figure it out on my own for a while, but I just kept going in circles and getting frustrated, so eventually, I thought 'what would Naruto do?'"

Wow. That was flattering on a level Naruto really wasn't all that familiar with. He'd been used as an example of good behaviour in the Academy before, but that tended to be in the format of "do the exact opposite of what Naruto does, boys and girls, and you're sure to grow up to become fine ninja". (Of course, it didn't take him long to figure out how to game that particular system, and all use of Naruto as an example stopped immediately after the Chewing Gum Incident). Upon hearing Hinata's words, he could feel his face starting to grow hot in spite of his best efforts.

"So I started with the reading list you'd given me, and I went through all of that, but there was nothing which really seemed to address the problem, so I-"

"Hold on," Naruto interrupted. "The entire reading list? In two months?"

Hinata shook her head. "No, less than that. Oh, you wouldn't know - there are special accelerated reading techniques for Byakugan users, since we can see the full spread of a scroll, or a double-page spread of a book, all in one go. But anyway, when I didn't find anything, I decided to go through the books _you'd_ been reading to see if that would help."

"How did you know what I'd been reading?" Naruto made a mental note to have a serious conversation with Hinata about privacy and personal boundaries sometime soon. For a start, she needed to know that they were things that existed.

"I infiltrated the offices of the libraries I know you go to, and examined their records," Hinata told him in much the same tone of voice as she used to discuss the weather. "There was this great book in the bibliography of one of your other books. It talked about evaluating evidence, and how to admit when you simply didn't have enough information, instead of just going with the most likely option you have at the time. So that's what I tried to do. And... um..."

The ground beneath Hinata's feet suddenly seemed to be of deep and endless interest to the girl.

Naruto waited patiently for a few seconds, but finally couldn't restrain himself. "What happened?"

"It was... all so obvious. I realised that I honestly didn't know which interpretation of your note was right, or even if they were both wrong. I'd been driving myself crazy based on all these things... that only really existed in my head. You must think it's ridiculous. All I had to do was wait and ask." There was a slight wry, self-mocking expression on Hinata's face which Naruto didn't remember ever seeing there before.

Naruto considered what he'd been told. Then he considered it some more. It did not seem to fit anything in his understanding of how human behaviour worked.

"So let me get this straight," he said, slowly and carefully. "You started thinking bad things about me. Then you realised that your reasons for doing so weren't good enough. So you conducted independent research to fix errors in your thinking, and decided to give me the benefit of the doubt until you could ask me in person."

Hinata nodded tentatively, not sure where this was going.

"Hinata, will you have dinner with me tomorrow night?" The words left Naruto's mouth before he knew it.

"Just so we don't have any more misunderstandings... this is that dinner you promised me for being a good friend during your time in hospital?" Hinata asked cautiously.

Naruto shook his head. "This is me asking you out on a date after hearing the most amazing thing I've ever heard a girl say in my life."

Hinata was speechless.

"Meet you at seven tomorrow evening by the Nagasumi Fountain?"

Hinata nodded shakily. She wanted to pinch herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming, but was suddenly acutely aware of how embarrassing this (as well as any other action she could possibly take) would look in front of Naruto.

"Great," Naruto beamed. "And if they dare try to send me on another mission, I'm just going to have to fake Spontaneous Chakra Combustion Disease or something. I won't let _anything_ get in the way this time."

With that, he said goodbye and quickly left. His completely unplanned dive into the world of romance had, once again, not taken account of minor concerns such as the fact that he owned no date-worthy clothes, and that he hadn't the faintest idea of where in this country one took somebody for a first date.

-o-

Naruto zoomed between clothes shops at full ninja speed. His quest was urgent, but also perilous, partly due to the outrageous price of fashionable clothing (especially since he'd never been to most of these shops before, and thus did not know which ones would have a special Naruto-only markup) and partly because he was flat-out refused entry to a number of retailers for wearing a blasphemous crime against all that is holy in fashion (sic). Oh, and it also didn't help that Naruto's own fashion sense was deep in the negative, and he could thus only rely on his memories of Tsunami's attempts to make him look presentable.

As he looked through clothes, Naruto went back to pensive mode. Was he really about to start dating Hinata? How had that happened? Sure, she was ridiculously cute, surprisingly bright, a quick and dedicated learner, earnest and compassionate, plus a few other things on top, but was this really OK? What if it got in the way of her training? What if her family found out and decided to have him killed (which, given the impression he got of her father, they totally could)?

Then again, he had always intended to get closer to her, and to get to know her better, as part of his efforts to help unlock her potential (although he'd just been hoping they'd end up as friends, however _that_ mysterious and alien phenomenon was supposed to work). One could argue this was another path towards the same end. And as future Hokage, he couldn't flinch away from a confrontation just because his opponent was the village's most powerful clan, with unique powers practically tailor-made to counter his own, capable of crushing him like a bug and only improving their public standing by doing so.

A more troubling issue was that Naruto simply had no idea how dating worked. Even the romances in his manga focused firmly on the trials and tribulations of getting into a relationship with the right person, and paid relatively little attention to the actual mechanics of what one did once said relationship was established. He somehow had an inkling that Hinata would be no better informed, which meant they were in for a great deal of improvisation. And his improvisations had a way of producing what one might term "spectacular" results, for better or worse.

There was also Haku. Did he still have feelings for the missing-nin boy? If he did, was this relevant to the present situation? Was he in some way dishonouring that connection by dating someone else straight away, or was that not how it worked at all? Not for the first time in his life, Naruto wished he had someone he could trust with these kinds of complicated issues, but the Hokage was apparently not on speaking terms with him right now, Iruka-sensei had been a bachelor as long as Naruto had known him, and he flat-out did not want to know what kind of romantic advice he might receive from Kakashi-sensei, given the man's taste in literature.

In the meantime, he was getting nowhere with his shopping. Nowhere. Fashion was a completely alien world to Naruto, one which might as well have had no atmosphere and been full of hungry space monsters. The only thing he could do now was the one thing he'd been praying he could avoid.

-o-

"Sakura, would you mind helping me pick out clothes for a date?"

Sakura stared at him as he stood on her doorstep. "A date? You? Who would possibly want to date _you_?"

Naruto suppressed the first couple of responses that came to mind, since he did need Sakura's help.

"Hinata."

"Huh." Sakura felt a momentary surge of frustration at the fact that Hinata, of all, people, had not only actually made her move, but was now further ahead in her love life than _she_ was. There really was no justice in the world.

Once that initial impulse faded, however, Sakura began to appreciate the benefits of no longer having Naruto ask her out every five seconds. Also, while she didn't know the girl all that well, she _did_ know Naruto, and there was such a thing as general female solidarity.

"Congratulations. Now, I'll say this only once. Hinata is a delicate, sensitive soul who's far too good for the likes of you, and if you break her heart I swear I'll kick your ass so hard that the first ninja to make it to the moon will be wondering why it's littered in human teeth."

"I'll add you to the list," Naruto muttered.

"What?"

"Nothing. So will you help me?"

Sakura thought about it. Again, it seemed unfair to unleash something like Naruto onto an unsuspecting girl like Hinata without at least trying to soften the blow.

"Maybe. How long have you got to prepare?"

"The date's tomorrow evening," Naruto told her.

Sakura gave him a disbelieving look. "You've got to be kidding me. I guess I can help you, but it's going to be a lot of work, and I did have plans for tonight. You're going to have to make it worth my while."

"How do you mean?" Naruto asked warily.

Sakura hadn't actually planned this far. What did she actually want from Naruto in exchange for taking him clothes shopping? A vow of silence, maybe? Then an idea occurred to her, great and terrible at once.

"I think you'd better come in."

-o-

Once tea was served (Sakura having been drilled in the fundamentals of being a good host whether she wanted to or not by her parents), she took a deep breath. It was a crazy thought, but the more she looked at it from different angles, the more it made a twisted, mind-boggling kind of sense.

"I want you to set me up on a date with Sasuke."

"I'm sorry," Naruto said, "I don't think I caught that."

Sakura gritted her teeth. "A date. With Sasuke. I want you to arrange one for me."

Naruto could hear the individual words, and he was pretty sure he knew what they meant. But how did they fit together into a sentence? Was Sakura using some unfamiliar rhetorical device? She couldn't _really_ mean...

Sakura gave him a look which indicated that failure to respond would not impact well on his lifespan.

"You want _me_ to set you up on a date with Sasuke?"

"Yeah," Sakura nodded, looking deeply into her cup so as not to meet Naruto's gaze.

"Why _me_?" Naruto stressed the pronoun nearly to breaking point. "What makes you think that Sasuke would listen to me for a second about something so personal?"

Sakura tried to compose her thoughts. The ideas themselves weren't new, but she never thought she'd have to express them to another person before, and it wasn't easy.

"Look, Sasuke is different from most people. He's special. He sees the world in a way the likes of you or me couldn't hope to grasp."

Naruto frowned at this, but didn't interrupt. There was a time when he'd have given his right hand to have Sakura confide in him. It was a time long gone, but looking at her, all serious and earnest, and sounding as if his opinion of what she thought actually mattered, brought back faint echoes of feelings he'd thought dead and buried.

"He's always got his eyes on the horizon. He sees great dreams and visions instead of getting bogged down in everyday things. But thanks to that... he doesn't really see other people. He doesn't talk to us. He brushes us off when we talk to him. He barely even notices we're there, like we're just scenery painted on the background of his life."

Sakura took a sip of tea, watching Naruto carefully for his reaction. Naruto assumed a practiced neutral expression, trying to match the Sasuke in Sakura's mind to the real thing, and having little success.

"So what does this have to do with me?"

Sakura took a deep breath. "I know, I just know that if I could get Sasuke to see me for who I am, even for a single night, then he'd realise we're meant to be together. But I'm getting nowhere. He doesn't even register me trying to ask him out. That's why I need your help."

"OK," Naruto said. "I still don't see where I come in. A few weeks ago you told me I had the emotional sensitivity of a wild pig. Out of everyone who could do it, why would you want _me_ to play matchmaker for you?"

"Because," Sakura told him, "I don't know how or why, but it's like you seem to irritate him to the point where he knows you're there. He notices you where he doesn't notice the rest of us. He responds to you. He talks to you like a normal person, while ignoring everyone else. He only has eyes for you."

She stopped sharply. "Uh, that came out wrong. I didn't mean it like that. It's not like that." Her voice rose as she suddenly remembered her speculations from the Wave mission. "It's not like that at all, you hear me! And if you try to _make _it like that, I swear I'll-"

"Sakura," Naruto cut her off. "I'm not after Sasuke. Ick. I'll have to wash my mouth out with soap after just saying that. I'm here to ask for your help dating Hinata, remember?"

Sakura relaxed a little, and quickly put away the leaking, freshly cracked teacup she'd been holding. It was lucky that her mother had the same temper as her, and as such bought the things in bulk.

"Sorry. Anyway, that's why I think he might listen to you. I know it's like performing delicate surgery with a sledgehammer, but you really are my only choice. So can you do this for me?"

Naruto considered. Messing with people's love lives wasn't exactly at the top of his priority list, especially given his absolute lack of experience, but on the other hand it would do Team Seven a world of good to have all its romantic complications resolved once and for all. And it _was_ just a date. What could possibly go wrong?

"All right. I'll get you a date with Sasuke by the end of the year."

"What? That's, like, forever! Who knows what dirty tricks Ino might use to lure him away before then!"

Naruto shook his head. "If you wanted me to trick or blackmail him into going on a date with you, that could take a few days or weeks. But is that really how you want this to go?"

"I guess not," Sakura said, her tone suggesting that she considered a year to be little short of eternity.

"Trust me," Naruto told her. "It's going to take time to find a way of making Sasuke want to actually go on a date with you of his own accord, but I'll manage it. It'll be a challenge worth taking on. Anyway, now that's sorted out, we should get going before the shops close."

-o-

"Good, now try this on."

-o-

"No good. Next!"

-o-

"Too big!"

-o-

"Too small!"

-o-

"Too light!"

-o-

"Too dark! Grimdark _is _in style this season, but a happy-go-lucky guy like you could never pull it off."

-o-

"That pattern's all wrong for you!"

-o-

"Orange and blue? No. Hell no. You die now."

-o-

"How about those sunglasses? Hmm, we might actually be on to something here. I never thought the megane look would work on you, but... Go on, say something clever-sounding."

"The role of paratext in transformative fiction may be seen as-"

"Wait, no, what was I thinking? Just keep your mouth shut. In fact, that's a good policy for the date in general. Now try this jacket on."

-o-

By the end of the evening, Naruto was feeling more wrung out than a sponge after a D-rank twelve-hour dishwashing mission (yes, those existed, though they were generally reserved for those who _really_ upset the Hokage), but he did at least have some clothes that went well together, and did not make him look insane or colour-blind - for the first time in his life, according to Sakura.

Finally at the front of the interminable queue, Naruto reached into his pocket and prepared to part with the majority of his precious A-rank pay - but in addition to his frog wallet, his hand encountered a folded-up piece of paper. A folded-up piece of paper he had not put there. After paying for his clothes, Naruto quickly made his excuses to Sakura and bolted for the nearest public toilets to read.

_Hatake Kakashi is currently facing a secret military tribunal. He is accused of attempting to sabotage an A-rank mission, and of interfering with the politics of a sovereign state without Leaf authorisation. Should his guilt be proved, he will likely face capital punishment._

_The end of the trial cannot be delayed beyond tomorrow morning, and those responsible for proving Hatake Kakashi's innocence cannot be trusted. If you are aware of any evidence which may exonerate him, by proving that he did not refuse reinforcements for his recent mission to the Country of the Wave, and that he did not order the assassination of one Gatō Amand, you must bring it to the tribunal, beneath the abandoned bookshop on the corner of Kusaribe Alley and Yagyū Road, no later than 4am tomorrow._

4am tomorrow was in six hours.


	12. Chapter 11

_A/N: Another ridiculous delay later, here is Chapter XI. This chapter was originally meant to be half the length, but then a certain foul-mouthed cynic started talking. On which note, content advisory for more foul language than the rest of the fic thus far combined._

_ Special thanks go to my faithful beta readers, Nezumi, sehrrhes and (as of this chapter) Traiden. In addition, thanks to edao for writing in with a list of typos for past chapters, which have now been corrected. Finally, as ever, thanks to my reviewers for letting me know what you think. There can never be too many reviews, nor can any of them be "too long". If I was afraid of walls of text, I'd stick to writing haiku._

_On which note, now I'm actually getting a few negative reviews: for the love of the Night Angels, people, if there are changes you feel need making, be clear about them. "Naruto is still stupid", for example, tells me nothing about *what* I've written that makes you think so, or what he's lacking that would make him genuinely intelligent in your estimation._

_For spoiler tracking purposes, the anime has just revealed the names of the Tailed Beasts.  
_

_"Old Stone Face" wasn't actually a __reference to __ Vimes, although as an avid Discworld fan I probably had it somewhere in the back of my mind. It was a consequence of my original, slightly different, image of the head librarian having "Ishi" as part of his surname. Then, when I was choosing a different name, I thought "Ishi" (Japanese for "stone") plus "Kao" (Japanese for "face") suggested an obvious nickname._

_I'm afraid I haven't read/seen Inuyasha. The reference, such as it was, was to Ranma 1/2._

_I *do* like my characters (except smart!Gaara, who is so scarily overpowered I have no idea how to stop him, and don't even get me started on smart!Orochimaru), but look at it my way - can you even imagine what smart!Naruto would do to the world if he wasn't kept busy by crisis after crisis?  
_

_In regards to background setting info, I'll try to put in more basic facts, and there's an obvious point a couple of chapters down where a detailed discussion of Narutoverse politics would be natural and appropriate._

_Since a lot of people are apparently getting turned off by "Nine-Brains" as clashing with the general tone of the story, I'm going to be cutting down on that particular title from now on. The inspiration/homage/blatant stealing of ideas from the HPMOR omake has been established well enough by now.  
_

_Speaking of tone, I should clarify that this was never meant to be a 100% serious fanfic. To me, the fact that Naruto's everyday life is threaded through with an undercurrent of humour (I know, people have died for less mixed metaphors) strengthens the impact of the parts where that humour is suppressed, rather than undermining them. Naruto is an ostracised child with a monster inside him trying to eat his soul, and it would be all too easy to go grimdark from there, but that's not what this story is about. This story is about... well... lighting up the dark._

_Since I apparently fail at deadlines (and also have to factor in my beta readers' schedules), I don't think it's a good idea to keep trying to commit to any sort of regular timetable. I will keep writing, however, and not vanish into the ether._

-o-

The text Naruto had just read was unreal. It was something out of a spy thriller. Leaf had not seen two-day secret military tribunals for decades, not since the days of the Second Hokage when the Blue Ink Crisis had necessitated the legislation of some frankly terrifying legal powers in the name of village security. Of course, since they were _secret_ tribunals, it was entirely possible that they continued to take place every day without Naruto knowing, but he vaguely remembered being taught that the Third had repealed the laws involved not long after his accession. Had they been reinstated during Naruto's absence?

And then there was the "those responsible... cannot be trusted" part. This suggested that someone very influential was out to get Kakashi-sensei, someone with the power to block or pervert the course of an entire investigation. The note's sender had to be very influential as well - they were aware of the details of a secret tribunal, after all - which suggested that Naruto was being dragged into a conflict between two (or more) heavyweights. Ordinarily, that should have been scary as hell, but now... now Naruto knew that some major power in the village, one capable of overruling the Hokage himself, was also responsible for all the suffering in his life. If this was an opportunity to see some of Leaf's movers and shakers first-hand, and simultaneously find out which of them was evil enough to try to frame Kakashi-sensei for treason, there was no way he could back down. He was going to do this, for Kakashi-sensei, for a chance to take another step towards his revenge, and for his pride, which wouldn't let him give up on a challenge without trying.

All right. Time to think it through logically, step by step. Given that no-one had even bothered summoning him as a witness to the trial, when he'd been the one to kill Gatō on Kakashi-sensei's alleged orders, it seemed like the whole thing was a sham, and not a genuine attempt to find out the truth in any way. His aim therefore wasn't really to exonerate Kakashi-sensei, but to find evidence that would stretch out the trial long enough for whoever had sent him the note to find other means of solving the problem, such as through political pressure. Not that this really changed things - he was still after the best evidence possible, in the biggest possible quantities. And there was one more thing he could do...

Yes, the solution to the issue of Gatō's assassination suggested itself almost instantly. It wouldn't be enough to simply admit that he'd acted on his own rather than on Kakashi-sensei's orders, since then he might end up being tried for the same crime instead. But what he _could_ do... he didn't like it, and it made him feel more than a little dirty, but, in the end, he thought what he was going to do would be understood. Maybe even forgiven.

The hard part would be the reinforcements issue. There was no reason for Kakashi-sensei to lie to them about calling in reinforcements, so he probably had. But for all the tactical advantages of leaving nothing on interceptable scrolls, it meant there was no physical evidence of the request. That brought it down to witnesses.

He, Sasuke and Sakura had all been asleep at the time of the hand-over, so that was right out. The staff at Takeda's Wayside Inn might have seen something, but there were a number of reasons not to rely on them, not least the fact that there was no way he could make it there and back in six hours. At least _probably_ not. Kakashi-sensei had told him that the Fox was able to beat Haku on speed using only the techniques in Naruto's arsenal, so as a last resort he could try to invent some sort of super-fast travel technique in the time remaining to him. But that was probably best left for plan B, or maybe plan Z.

Naruto thought through the events of the day. The prisoner had been handed over to the four Chūnin, who had taken him through the forest, to the gate, signed in at the gate, then gone through the village to the ANBU headquarters, and signed the prisoner over. So he could find out the names of the Chūnin who were supposed to convey the message quite easily, and question them.

Except that was a bad idea. They were one of the two possible weak links in the chain - either the four had failed to deliver the message, or ANBU had received it and then pretended they hadn't. In case of the former, he was only going to be told lies, and would also be alerting his enemies to his investigation. In case of the latter, he was pretty much doomed from the start. If ANBU had been subverted...

Wait. There was a third option. The missing-nin, the Demon Brother whose name he could find out easily from the gate records, would not be aligned with any faction in Leaf, corrupt or otherwise, and over _him_ Naruto might actually have some leverage - more than he would over the four Chūnin or ANBU, anyway. In addition, he probably didn't expect to be questioned, and wouldn't have spent time preparing a plausible story that concealed the particular information Naruto wanted. The prisoner might have witnessed Kakashi-sensei's reinforcement request, or at the very least overheard conversations between the Chūnin that might give a clue as to their motives and plans. He was still gambling that the man's ANBU jailors were innocent, but since they hadn't been involved in the reinforcements issue thus far, that was quite likely (short of the whole organisation being in on it).

All right. Naruto set off at a run towards his first destination.

-o-

ANBU receptionist and office administrator Matsunaga Nao half-heartedly sorted through equipment requisition forms while listening to the clock tick away the minutes until the end of her shift. To her right, a thick metal door led to the rest of the complex. To her left, the smell of life-giving coffee wafted in from the entrance to the break area, where her replacement was already waiting as per standard procedure. Occasionally, her right hand would tug unconsciously at the purple ponytail over her shoulder, as if to check that it was still there.

After perhaps a hundred thousand near-identical forms (or at any rate, at least thirty), her work was interrupted by a late-night visitor, a boy she couldn't help but recognise thanks to his ridiculous orange outfit. Uzumaki Naruto, she recalled, had all but single-handedly exposed and captured a traitorous Chūnin instructor before even graduating from the Academy - a feat that had put his name on a number of interesting lists.

If he maintained this track record of exceptional achievement, Nao knew, then one night in a few years' time he'd wake up to discover a mysterious masked shinobi at the foot of his bed, there to make him the offer of a lifetime. If he accepted... a few days later he'd be taken away and likely never heard from again. If he refused the offer to betray Leaf in exchange for what his psychological profile suggested he wanted most, or pretended to agree and then reported the shinobi to the authorities the next day, he'd pass the second stage of the ANBU selection process. (Rumour had it that Uchiha Itachi had somehow coerced the "recruiter" into giving him a leadership position in the non-existent spy cell, and turned up at the ANBU headquarters the next day with the detailed list of agents, passwords and operating instructions that the man had originally invented purely as a way of getting into character.)

"Hello there, Naruto. What can I do for you?"

The boy smiled as he recognised her - receptionists being among the few categories of staff not required to maintain anonymity. "I need to interrogate a prisoner, Miss Matsunaga, the missing-nin Onigahara Tariki."

"You can call me Nao," she told him. "But I'm afraid that as a Genin, there's no possible chance you'd have the security clearance to conduct an interrogation. Your best bet is to get your team leader to authorise it for you."

"Ah," Naruto grimaced. "That would be the problem. My team leader is Hatake Kakashi, and he's in no position to authorise anything right now. I'm here because he needs help."

The receptionist's demeanour changed in an instant. "Captain Hatake needs help? Why didn't you say so before? Tell me everything you can."

Naruto quickly summed up the contents of the note. It was a gamble, but he'd need Nao on his side if he were to have a chance of success.

"Shit," Nao muttered. She thought for a few seconds. "All right, Naruto, I'm about to let you in on the most closely-guarded secret of the ANBU administrative staff. In times of crisis, we are formally obliged to do things by the Book."

She half-turned, in a practiced movement that left Naruto in her peripheral vision as she considered the enormous double row of thick tomes on the shelves behind her.

"What's that?"

"The Book." Nao picked up Volume IX and set it on the desk in front of her. "Also known as _Complete Rules and Regulations of the Assassination and Battle Tactics Special Unit_. Our ultimate weapon, expanded and empowered by generations of masters of the bureaucratic arts."

Nao opened the book and began to flick through it. "Have you passed your twelfth birthday, as recorded on your birth certificate?"

"Huh? Um, yeah," Naruto replied, caught slightly off guard. Not that his birth certificate had much to do with reality.

"Good, then clause 26 doesn't apply. Now, based on section 18, paragraph 6, and given that the current duty officer fulfils the criteria for clearance category L3, we can proceed straight to section 8..." Nao started to mutter to herself as she turned the pages back and forth, occasionally swapping in a different volume altogether, pausing only to ask Naruto the occasional inane question.

-o-

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a criminal organisation involved in smuggling operations across ninja village borders?"

-o-

"OK... You _haven't_ submitted forms 3314, 205 and 472b (twice) in advance, but I think paragraph 16, clause 3 can get us around that..."

-o-

"Technically, the current Hokage is the Third, but since he's taken the post twice, section 173, paragraph 2, clause 7b allows us to count him as the Fifth..."

-o-

"Have you ever carried out a mission in a squad including one or more members of Root?"

"What's Root?"

"Like ANBU, but evil. Oops, I did _not _just say that out loud." She looked up from the book sharply, and proceeded to recite, as if from memory, "The ANBU policy towards our Root colleagues is based on complete respect and professional cooperation, and it is in no way permissible for ANBU staff to advise members of the public to stay the hell away from Root if they value their life." She looked down again. "Anyway, that lets us invoke paragraph 4..."

-o-

_Meanwhile, somewhere deep underground, in a place very few people know exists..._

Although, as the Third Hokage, Sarutobi Hiruzen was trained to the peak of physical and mental fortitude, as a man long past the age of retirement (insofar as such a thing existed for shinobi) he nevertheless did not relish spending long periods of time in cold, damp subterranean spaces. As such, in spite of himself he felt a momentary sense of relief when he finally heard the inimitable "tap, tap, tap" of Shimura Danzō's cane.

It had an interesting rhythm, that sound. One who knew what to listen for would notice that it was not the slow, heavy rhythm of an old man relying on a stick for support. Nor was it the casual tap of someone carrying a cane as a convenient status symbol, or perhaps an elegant concealed weapon as some foreign aristocrats liked to do. No, to a fellow master this rhythm spoke louder than words: "I have already calculated exactly how to kill you in one motion from anywhere in the room, and am now choosing a suitable position at my leisure". The Hokage had seen would-be assassins flee from Danzō's presence upon hearing that rhythm, and silently commended them for their good sense.

"Why have you called me here, Hiruzen?" Danzō demanded in the tones of a long-suffering public servant whose only desire is to return to his interrupted work. Of course, given that he had been the one to arrange the meeting, this could only be a trick to assume control of the flow of conversation.

The Hokage would not give ground so easily. "I thought I had repealed all of the Second's emergency laws. Rest assured, by this time tomorrow I will have finished the job to the last loophole."

Danzō's only reaction was a slight raising of his eyebrows. "You always lacked foresight. I, on the other hand, knew this day would come, the day when the balance between us would have to be restored, and made sure your attention was... redirected... from certain records."

"What balance? I have taken care not to interfere with your work with Root." This was, of course, a lie, but Danzō would be hard-pressed to prove otherwise. "Do you have some other complaint?"

Danzō gave him a look. "Don't play dumb, Hiruzen, it doesn't suit you. You were too greedy. I could have tolerated your claiming the Uzumaki child - with difficulty, but I could have done it. I am nothing if not a patient man. But you should have left the Uchiha to me. Or vice versa. They are resources that belong to the entire village, not just to you."

"So that's what this is about?" the Hokage frowned. "You want me to give up one of this cohort's most promising children to Root?"

Danzō shook his head. "It's too late for such half-measures. Your every action keeps proving how unsuited you are to leadership. Unsurprising, of course, since that's just another thing you stole from me."

The Hokage opened his mouth, ready to rehash this age-old argument yet again, but Danzō didn't give him the chance.

"You can wear the hat, Hiruzen, if it matters to you so much. Who am I to stand in the way of a man desperately clinging to unearned pride? But I won't let you endanger the village with your incompetence. I won't just stand by while you let those two play children's games, growing up worthless and soft like the rest of your Genin. That's why I'm giving you a choice.

"You can try to keep them. Then Hatake will be convicted, and you'll lose one of your favourite pawns to no gain. I'm sure I don't need to remind you what punishments Master Tobirama decreed for treason.

"Or you can allow me to assign a squad leader of my choosing to replace Hatake." A certain hunger shone in Danzō's eyes. It was subtle enough that even the Third would have missed it, were he not familiar with every shade of expression his former best friend had to show. "If you do, your best shinobi will be released, to serve you elsewhere as you wish, and I'm not even asking to have Uzumaki and the Uchiha moved into Root. They can stay within your formal jurisdiction, but my chosen captain will have final control over their development. The girl will, of course, be transferred to another squad - I care not what you do with her - and I already have a most promising candidate to replace her."

"You must replace Hatake as squad leader no matter what," Danzō told the Hokage. "Your only choice is whether you care to spare his life."

The Hokage feigned intense thought. The fact of the matter was that he already had a number of schemes going to try to counter Danzō's gambit, from the wildcard that was Naruto, to a plan which would ensure that Team Seven could manage without a squad leader for the immediate future. Right now, he couldn't conduct any sort of investigation himself - Danzō had pulled some of his best shinobi from their missions in order to watch him and be ready to interfere in any attempt - which meant the best use of his time might be to keep Danzō talking. Every minute Danzō spent in this godsforsaken basement was another he couldn't use to reinforce his own position. And right now, every minute counted.

"You're the one who blocked the reinforcements to Kakashi's mission, I take it?" the Hokage asked. "You realise they were nearly wiped out as a result?"

Danzō shrugged. "If the Demon Fox host and the last Uchiha, under the leadership of Sharingan Kakashi, could not take care of a low A-rank mission, then their power would have been insufficient for me to concern myself with their survival in the first place. On the other hand, if they survived, as they did, their power would increase significantly, as it has."

"And I take it you are offering to sacrifice four of your own men - who were acting on your orders - if I take the deal? All just to keep those two boys out of my hands?"

"Do not waste my time with pointless questions," Danzō said sharply. "You know as well as I do that _something is coming_. Every village is making preparations and maximising their resources - they are all doing whatever it takes to be ready. Something is coming, and I will not allow you to doom Hidden Leaf with your weakness and inaction. Too many good men have fallen, and too many more will fall, for you to dishonour their sacrifice with yet more failure."

For a brief second, the lights flickered, and had anyone been able to see Danzō's face in the darkness, he would have looked less like a ruthless powermonger and more like a very, very tired man who knew that the world would fall apart if he so much as stopped to take a breath.

Then the lights returned, and he continued as if nothing had happened. "You were never able to make the difficult decisions, Hiruzen, never able to make the sacrifices that need to be made to protect what's important. I am making them for you, and though I know I cannot expect any gratitude from you and yours, I expect you to at least make the effort to act rationally, for the good of your faction if not of the village. Make your decision about Hatake before the trial resumes. I'll be waiting."

And then there was just a rhythmic tapping sound, and then silence.

The Hokage sighed. Normally, he could tie Danzō up in philosophical debate for hours if that's what it took - part tactical manoeuvre, part yet another hopeless attempt to pull someone who mattered back out of the darkness - but his talk with Naruto had left him too emotionally exhausted. He stood there for a few seconds more, then began the slow walk back. There were cunning plots to weave, and dreary paperwork to process, and at times like these the Hokage honestly couldn't say which one he hated more.

-o-

"I think we're nearly there," Nao announced, her eyes locked on Volume IV. "Would you say, in your best judgment, that the current situation threatens an irreversible breakdown of public order?"

"Yes," Naruto nodded firmly. Which is to say he would raise hell if Kakashi-sensei were falsely convicted of treason. There were vast, unplumbed depths of creativity he could draw upon if that's what it took, and if Leaf had thought he was a terror before, they had no idea what he could do now he actually had money.

"Great!" Nao finally looked up. "Then in accordance with clause 13a(ii) of paragraph 7 of section 245 of the Rules and Regulations of the Assassination and Battle Tactics Special Unit, I am bound to escort you to the low-security section and hand you over to the captain in charge, who will facilitate the interrogation."

She turned towards the break room door. "Yukari?" She raised her voice. "I need you to relieve me for a few minutes."

"Sure thing, Nao-baby," a young woman's voice responded.

Nao's expression changed somewhat. "Yukari, we have a _visitor_!" she practically hissed.

"Oh." Another, younger, woman emerged from the break room, looking like she wished she knew an instant earth-opening-up-and-swallowing-oneself technique. "I mean 'Saitō Yukari, acknowledging reception area handover, ma'am!'"

Nao gave Naruto a look that quite plainly said "I'm helping you out here, so just pretend that never happened", and silently took him through the large metal door.

-o-

Naruto was led to the entrance to the prison section, where an enormous reinforced door slowly opened after a few words from Nao. On the other side, the duty officer, a tall ANBU man with a crow-themed mask, told her to go back to her post, and Naruto to wait. He then half-turned back, keeping one eye on Naruto, and gave a guard a few brief instructions.

Several seconds later, a loud voice came out of nowhere, nearly making Naruto jump. Loudspeakers, like most electronic technology, were rare and expensive as heck, but then the ANBU budget was nothing short of insane.

"Attention: Areas Three through Seven are now at Yellow Alert. Prisoner no. 435 is now being transferred from Cell Block D to Interrogation Chamber Four. Repeat: Areas Three through Seven are now at Yellow Alert. Prisoner no. 435 is now being transferred from Cell Block D to Interrogation Chamber Four."

The officer looked back to Naruto.

"Listen carefully," he told Naruto in what could only be described as the emphatic monotone of someone who had delivered the same speech, word for word, a thousand times, but had never stopped caring about it. "Matsunaga said you needed a private interrogation chamber, so here are the rules. You surrender all weapons, loose items, jewellery et cetera before entering the room. You do not move from your seat unless there are at least four guards in the room with you. If for any reason you find yourself out of your seat, you do not under any circumstances approach the prisoner, not even if you think you'll still be out of reach. You do not use techniques. Repeat these instructions back to me."

Naruto did, feeling more than a little anxious.

The captain nodded with faint approval. Every shinobi was expected to train their memory to peak performance, but sadly that didn't mean they all did.

"There will be four guards outside. The acoustic properties of the room scramble speech, but it is still recognisable as speech from outside. If they hear shouting, or anything at all that doesn't sound like a person speaking, they will enter immediately. If they hear nothing for a full minute, they will enter immediately. If you press the concealed alarm button under the edge of the table nearest to you, they will enter immediately. If there is any impact against the door, they will enter immediately. Repeat this information back to me.

"If anything unexpected happens, summon the guards immediately. If you feel threatened, no matter what the reason, or even if there seems to be no reason, summon the guards immediately. If you feel confused, or have difficulty thinking or moving, summon the guards immediately. If you find yourself having thoughts or feelings inappropriate to the situation in nature or intensity, summon the guards immediately. Repeat these instructions back to me."

Satisfied, the captain led him to the interrogation chamber. To Naruto's disappointment, whoever had designed the ANBU complex had put some thought into it, and left a route that gave visitors no chance to satisfy their curiosity about the actual layout and contents of the prison.

Naruto did, however, get a glimpse of the ANBU approach to secure construction inside the chamber itself. A table and two chairs were arranged parallel to the wall with the door, such that anyone coming in had quick and easy access to both the visitor and the prisoner. All furniture was bolted to the floor, and while the interrogator's chair merely looked uncomfortable (as if it had been hewn from one piece of stone), the prisoner's chair came with floor-mounted "boots" to hold the feet, and locks on the back to fit the hand restraints all prisoners wore at all times. Anyone sitting in that monstrosity would be effectively immobilised.

He also took note of the guards' equipment before they left him alone with the prisoner. One had no visible weapons at all, while two others had retractable claw gauntlets on both arms. The fourth had strange metal devices like completely blunt knuckle-dusters in his hands. After a few seconds, it occurred to Naruto that they might be chakra blades, which he'd been taught about at the Academy, though the ones he'd seen had a vertical point or edge for focusing the wielder's chakra into a sharp blade, not to mention spikes on the punching edge. He didn't understand the significance of all this until later, when he idly pondered how he'd go about escaping an ANBU prison, and realised that there was no possible way to disarm the guards or turn their weapons against them.

Contrary to Naruto's expectations, which had included one tabletop lamp providing a narrow beam that left the questioner's face in shadow, the room was brightly lit by a ceiling-mounted light the rough size and shape of a dinner plate. As such, he had no difficulty making out the baleful glare Onigahara Tariki was directing at him.

Tariki looked considerably worse for wear compared to their last meeting, with fresh scars visible on his face and hands, and grey streaks in his previously black hair. The standard-issue ANBU prisoner uniform, high-visibility orange with strips of reflective material, and "ANBU prisoner 435" emblazoned across front and back in big white letters, stood out starkly against the featureless grey of the room.

Naruto had no idea how to interrogate a prisoner. He would much rather have left doing so to a professional - but right now he didn't know who to trust, and could not be sure that ANBU hadn't been caught up in the strange power politics surrounding Kakashi-sensei's trial. He was lucky that he'd managed to get this far without anyone trying to stop him.

"My name is Uzumaki Naruto," he finally told the prisoner. "I have something I need to ask you."

Tariki did not respond except to sneer ever so faintly, as if to remind Naruto of the absurdity of asking for favours from the man whose imprisonment he was responsible for.

This was not lost on Naruto, who had spent most of the journey here racking his brain for some sort of leverage he could use to get the information he wanted out of a hostile source.

"There are things I could offer you in exchange," he said.

Tariki gave a short, sarcastic laugh, almost a bark. "Of course there are. Go ahead, wave your magic wand and make the Mizukage forgive my 'crimes'. Or pull the Sword That Cuts Iron out of your ass and use it to break these bonds so I can escape. Or maybe you're the Second Hokage in disguise, and you can blackmail the very demons of Hell to give my brother back to me, how about that? No? Then fuck off and stop wasting the little time I have left."

Naruto was taken aback by the sheer disgust in Tariki's voice. He had to do something about that. Any offer he made while the man was in this frame of mind was much more likely to be rejected. He needed to... what? To build rapport somehow? Naruto wasn't exactly well-versed in the subtleties of interrogation.

"I'm sorry about your brother," he said.

The prisoner gave him a look of weary contempt. "Subtle like an exploding tag to the face. I'm guessing they don't keep you around for your interrogation skills." He looked at Naruto's costume. "Or your stealth."

He sighed. "Look, you little prick, I can tell you're not getting the hint, so I'm going to break this down for you, and then you're going to fuck off and leave me alone. The best case scenario for me is that your ANBU buddies keep torturing me until they decide I've got nothing left to tell them. Then, depending on what kind of 'justice' Leaf likes these days, they either execute me or keep me imprisoned for the rest of my life. Then your medic-nin vultures pick over my remains to see if they can drag any Mist secrets out of them. Then if there are any bones left they get chucked on a shelf in some storage facility and left to gather dust. If I'm lucky, they might even be in the same room as my brother's.

"That's the best case scenario. The more likely one is that after ANBU's done torturing me, Leaf acknowledges they've got me, and trades me back to Mist. Then _our_ ANBU tortures me until they've got everything they can out of me, including anything I've learned about Leaf, and believe me, they make your ANBU look like fucking pansies. Then they give me a nice, _thorough_ public execution to remind everyone else what Mist does to 'traitors'. And if there's anything left of my body after the execution's finally over, they make sure to desecrate the remains so my spirit can never be at peace.

"So with all that in mind, just what do you think you can offer me, you little shitstain?"

Naruto opened his mouth. No words came. He'd never really... thought... about what happened to captured enemies. He'd never... He'd...

There were no words. There were no thoughts. Time passed in silence.

A guard opened the door. "Do you need help?"

Concise, short syllables, easier to answer quickly than "are you all right?", the back of Naruto's mind noted absently.

It was Tariki who responded. "Take him out. He's done."

Acting on autopilot, Naruto started to get up. He was nearly out of his chair-

If I leave now, Kakashi-sensei will die.

It was only that thought flashing across his mind that stopped him. He stood still, unaware that his body was in an awkward half-standing position, and repeated it to himself, deliberately now.

If I leave now, Kakashi-sensei will die.

If I leave now, Kakashi-sensei will die.

If I leave now, Kakashi-sensei will die.

Slowly, he made himself sit back down. "I- I'm fine. Thank you."

The guard looked at him appraisingly for a few seconds. "Interrogation is draining. If you find your mental, emotional or physical condition deteriorating, you should end the session and resume after you've had time to recover."

Naruto nodded. "Th-Thanks. But I need to get this done tonight."

The guard left.

Naruto took a deep breath. It felt like dropping a grain of sand into an abyss, but he still said it. "I _am _sorry. About your brother, and about what's going to happen to you."

"Spare me," Tariki told him. "You won, we lost. You live, we die. Are you really going to pretend you'd rather it was it the other way round?"

"N-No," Naruto said. "But... But that doesn't mean I want it to be like this!" His voice was still shaking. "I fought you because I had to, to protect my team and my client! That doesn't mean I wanted you to be tortured and killed!"

Tariki rolled his eyes to the heavens. "Sage's blood, I'd rather be back with the ANBU and their clever little instruments than listening to this shit."

He was quiet for a moment. "Look, you fucking worthless excuse for a ninja, you think you have sort of moral high ground for being on the defending team? Let's be clear about this. Sooner or later, it's going to be _your_ mission to assassinate some poor sucker whose only fault is that he's got enemies rich enough to afford ninja. Or maybe you'll be stealing documents with trade secrets. Suddenly, poof! Some formerly-rich bastard's out of business, and his employees don't have jobs, and their families don't have food on the table, and their children starve to death, and tears and drama all round, and you're the guy who made it happen. Or maybe you could only take the missions that let you come out smelling of roses, and turn down the rest. Except do you know what they call guys who refuse to obey orders? 'Traitors'. I'm sure you'll be rushing to join the club for the sake of your precious morality now you know what _that _means.

"Fuck it, why am I even explaining this to you?" Tariki asked loudly, as if the thought had just occurred to him. "I'm not your master, I'm your fucking worst enemy, the guy from whom you took everything." He paused. "But you know what, whatever. I'm going to strip away your retarded little illusions, and then you can fuck off and take the 'oh I'm so noble' bullshit with you.

"This is your world. Are you with me? This is where you live. You took money to protect that bridge-builder guy. Why? Because your village wants money, because money is power, and power is survival. Jiriki and I took Gatō's money to kill the same guy. Why? Because money is power, and power is survival. Gatō wanted him dead so he could keep squeezing money out of the people of Wave. Why? Go on, take a guess.

"There's only one thing anyone wants, in the end, and that's to survive. Love? Ambition? Duty? Revenge? Good luck with those when you're six feet under. Survival always comes first. And it never comes free. There's a price to pay just for staying alive in this shithole of a world, and sooner or later you'll have to make other people pay it for you before they do the same to you. And then you'll want power like you've never wanted it before in your life. Those with power can bargain. They can choose what to give and what to take. Without power, you own nothing, you _are_ nothing, because everything you have and everything you are can be taken away at another's whim." There was an odd stress to those last few words.

"And you, kid, are no special little snowflake. Pretend to be noble, pretend to be a fucking tragic hero trying to do good in a fucked-up world. Truth is, that world's part of you and you are part of it, and at the end of the day, whether you're a holy saint or an absolute monster, you'll reach for power or you'll be crushed underfoot by the guys who do. No third option."

Naruto's hands, safely concealed beneath the edge of the table, were trembling. Not only had he lost control of the conversation (if he'd ever had it to begin with), but that impulse to flee, barely suppressed to begin with, was surging again. Tariki's sheer conviction gave his words the weight of hammer blows, and Naruto had no defence that would let him stand his ground. What was he supposed to say? "No you're wrong - you might be about to be tortured and executed, but the world is all sunshine and roses really"? What evidence did he have that Tariki was wrong about even a single one of his claims?

The prisoner just watched him, with a glint of satisfaction in his eyes, waiting for him to get up and leave.

Naruto wanted to. It was his primary feeling, intense enough to block out nearly everything else. But if he left now, Kakashi-sensei would die. But if he didn't leave now... the thought refused to complete.

In the chaotic miasma of Naruto's thoughts, there was a part of his mind desperately trying to think rationally, aware on a things-you-drop-fall-down level that this was what you were supposed to do when in trouble, but not actually having the resources to manage it. Suddenly, it saw an easy-to-make logical connection and went for it. Naruto wanted to leave. If he left, Kakashi-sensei would die. Therefore Naruto wanted Kakashi-sensei to die.

What.

Naruto snapped out of his distracted mental state with a sudden jarring sensation of alertness, as if he'd just found himself about to walk into a lamppost. Did he just conclude on the basis of logical syllogism that he wanted Kakashi-sensei to die? That... that was stupid on so many levels, and so profoundly, that he didn't think he quite had the words to describe it.

OK. Let's just pretend that never happened, and get back to work.

Naruto took a deep breath, then another one. Ninja Teaching no. 11: breathing techniques are the quickest and easiest way to take control of your mental state. It took time, but gradually, Naruto's breathing grew slower and deeper. Some semblance of order returned to his mind, and he started to think.

First off, conviction and emotional impact didn't make an assertion more true. He'd been on the receiving end of enough angry rants and stern lectures to know that. At best, it might be evidence that the other person really believed what they were saying. Then again, there was an odd sort of correlation in Naruto's experience between people with strong beliefs and people who were horribly wrong, from the people convinced he was a monster whose death was the only way to save the village, to Haku and his unswerving devotion to a man who couldn't begin to value him as much as he deserved.

Likewise, while an adult's superior experience increased the probability of them knowing what they were talking about, it didn't automatically make them smarter or wiser. Having lots of raw data didn't automatically mean you drew the right conclusions from it. Funny, really, but when you listened to enough adults, you tended to find that the injunction to listen to one's elders was pretty much the _only_ thing they all agreed on.

All right. That was the abstract, easy part. Now he had to turn to Tariki's actual words, and that was still tough. He wanted him to be wrong, with a painful (if now tolerable) sort of desperation, but either way, all he could do was test his words against reality and see if they survived.

He didn't have to look far for examples of selfishness and evil in the world. His daily treatment at the hands of the villagers was enough, and at first sight it supported Tariki's case all the way. Indeed, that was part of what had made it so hard to argue against him in the first place - even without thinking about it consciously, some part of Naruto had resonated with a picture of the world that matched his own experiences so closely. But when he looked more carefully...

Every time they saw him, they hurt him... because they thought it would help them survive? Because they thought that if they didn't, he'd hurt them first? Because they thought it would give them power?

No. None of it quite fit, no matter how he turned it around in his head. They hurt him because... well, because they honestly believed that he was a monster, different and alien and dangerous. Most of them, anyway, the ones whose corruption wasn't absolute. And because they honestly believed that hurting monsters, and people who were too different in general, was right and proper, or at least permissible and understandable. It didn't make their behaviour forgivable - nothing could do that - but it did make it comprehensible. They weren't, for the most part, people who had sold out their morality in the name of staying alive. They were people who tried to live moral lives, but whose morality was upside down because they were stupid and short-sighted and selfish and unempathic and terminally incapable of thinking for themselves or taking even the slightest bit of responsibility for their own decisions.

And yet this world, a world that encouraged people to walk around with their eyes closed hurting each other, had also given birth to Iruka-sensei and Hinata and Haku. Tariki wasn't wrong - the world _was _a place of cruelty and selfishness and conflict in which people hurt and exploited each other, in which the strong trampled the weak, in which power was the only guarantee of safety even as it corrupted those who achieved it. And yet.

"You're wrong," Naruto told Tariki. "There are people in this world who try to do the right thing, not because it'll let them win conflicts or bring them profit, but because they want to help others and make the world a better place. They-"

"That's it?" the prisoner exclaimed. He'd obviously been expecting this response, or something like it. "That's the best you've got? You really _are _just off your mummy's tit, aren't you?"

He smirked. "I guess there's no chance of a little brat like you knowing much about other villages, so I'll make this real fucking simple for you using your own. Take your First Hokage. He wanted to unite the clans and teach them to live in peace and prosperity alongside commoners, so he wasted his life on diplomacy and negotiation and finally founded Leaf. Real noble, huh? All it got him was to be killed off by Uchiha Madara, who knew the score and had spent _his _life becoming a fucking unstoppable god of death. Oh, and the village system? We have that to thank for three great wars that were a thousand times more devastating than all the little clan skirmishes that had come before."

Naruto opened his mouth, but Tariki wasn't done.

"Let's move on to his granddaughter, Princess Tsunade of the Leaf Three. She had the bright idea of reviving the pretty-much lost art of Leaf-style medical ninjutsu. Improved on it, too, from what the stories say. No-one wants to die, so of course she was reckoned a hero. Except then she decided to take the logical next step, and she proposed that every squad should have its own medic-nin. Poor girl actually thought her superiors cared about saving lives. Do you know what happened?"

Naruto shook his head. He could guess, from the fact that Leaf _didn't_ have all that many medic-nin, but his history classes hadn't mentioned anyone called Tsunade. That meant something, if she'd really been that important.

"She got turned down. Know what happens when too many ninja live long enough to get real strong? Of course you don't, you idealistic little prick. They start getting ambitious. And there's nothing worse when you rule a ninja village than someone who thinks they can rule it better than you, and won't wait their turn.

"What," the missing-nin went on, "don't tell me you thought ninja fatality rates were all bad luck? Come _on_. If the Powers That Be wanted their ninja to survive, they'd have fewer of them, and invest their resources in training each one to Jōnin level, or as close as talent allows, instead of mass-producing a bunch of useless Genin each year. I've _been_ on the front lines of serious battles. Know what happens? First, they throw the Genin and the weaker Chūnin at the enemy, the guys who might have mastered one or two techniques at best, and any fighter worth his salt kills them off by the dozen. Only then do they send in anyone who can actually make a difference. Guys like you? You're meat for the grinder, you're lambs for the slaughter, you're the caltrops thrown to the ground to slow down pursuit for that one extra second while the real ninja get away.

"I like that look on your face. Means you're listening. So anyway, if all that kunai fodder survived, it would only inconvenience those in power, so Tsunade's proposal was rejected. Then the Third Great Ninja War broke out, and she lost everyone she ever loved, starting with her own brother, because there were no medic-nin at their side to save them. After that, she just vanished, never to be seen again. She'd learned her lesson about trying to do good in this world.

"And to finish off, how about the Fourth Hokage? Gave his life, everything he had, to seal away the Demon Fox and save Leaf. How's that worked out for him? He's dead and rotting, all the big reforms he had planned never happened, and they say Kyubey's new host is a bloodthirsty monster that makes Red Devil Uzumaki look like a fucking kitten. I'm told you people don't even dare speak its fucking name in case you draw its attention. _That's _what happens to good people in this world."

Naruto felt once again like he was clinging to a reef in the middle of a stormy sea, the prisoner's relentless litany of cynicism a swirling whirlpool trying its best to drag him in and drown him. He held on, however, because this time he had a response.

"You're missing the point."

"Huh?" _That_, Tariki had not seen coming.

"So good people are rare. So horrible things happen to them. So they never get what they were hoping for. That's not the point."

"What are you-"

But Naruto was on a roll now, finally reaching his time to talk back. "The point is: their existence isn't magic. It's not some great cosmic coincidence that makes good people appear in a world that's full of evil and suffering and darkness. Reality doesn't work that way. There are rules, there are concrete and discoverable reasons why some people do good and others do evil."

Naruto paused dramatically.

"And being a ninja is all about making the rules your bitch."

Tariki goggled. "You're fucking kidding me. _That's _your response? You think you can change the world? What the hell do you think you can possibly do?"

"I'm going to become Hokage," Naruto told him. "I'm going to use my intelligence to understand whatever the hell is wrong with people that makes them hurt each other, and I'm going to figure out a way to make it stop."

"And what makes you think that _you_, some tiny, naive little prick who doesn't know the first thing about real life, can pull something like that off?" Tariki asked, sounding almost intrigued, like an entomologist listening to the first report on a new and completely alien species of beetle.

"Because I'm me," Naruto said. "Because I'm a few months out of the Academy, and I've saved a country, beat a Jōnin, and forced S-rank secrets out of a head of state, and that's _before_ figuring out how to use the incredible unique powers lying dormant inside me. One of the richest men in the world is dead right now because he sent you to interfere with my first C-rank mission.

"This is my world now, and I will teach it to play by my rules."

Then there was a sound so unexpected that Naruto took a second to recognise it. Tariki was laughing.

His whole body was shaking to the very limits of what the restraints allowed, the laugh coming from the very depths of his body, so loud that an ANBU guard actually opened the door briefly to assess the situation. It seemed to last for hours, and every time Naruto thought the man was about to stop, he suddenly went into convulsions again.

"Oh, man," Tariki told him once he got his breath back. "That was fucking priceless. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. Makes me wish I could live to see just how you're going to crash and burn, because I'd bet my immortal fucking soul it's going to be spectacular."

He gave Naruto a more serious look. "Maybe I underestimated you. If even half of what you just said is true, you're so goddamn insane I actually want to see you take a stab at it."

The prisoner paused, then smirked, but this time seemingly at himself, as if half-disbelieving what he was about to say. "All right, kid, whatever it is you came here for, you get one shot. Give me your pitch, and I'll hear it out."

Naruto focused on his breathing again. Well, that conversation probably wasn't in any interrogation manual in the world. It had certainly added more than a few pieces to the ever-expanding "let's turn Naruto's world upside down with more ideas and information than he can process" collection. While it had been satisfying, in the end, to be able to boast to someone about all the things he'd genuinely done, it was more than a little uncomfortable to realise that his ambitions were growing faster than he could really take in their scope. But for now, he'd given himself the opportunity he needed to pursue his original goal, namely _saving Kakashi-sensei's life_.

So, what could he actually offer this man? The clues were there, if he'd read him right. The tricolon crescendo of his impossible demands. The conclusions of his projected scenarios. A few odd words. Balance that with what Naruto was realistically likely to be able to get, with his very specific field of influence...

"I can offer you and your brother an honourable burial next to each other in Leaf's Foreign Shinobi Cemetery, with the rites you request."

Tariki gave him a strange look, surprise mixed with intense attention. Was there maybe, just maybe, some suppressed hope in those eyes? "That doesn't happen to captured missing-nin. We're barely human in the eyes of the law. What makes you think they'll bend the rules that far at some Genin's request?"

That was the easy part. "The Hokage owes me a favour. A big favour. The kind you can't measure in ryō."

Tariki looked him in the eye. "Since you're here, I guess you managed to survive your mission with that bridge-builder guy, and I can believe that Gatō sent a Jōnin to finish the job after Jiriki and I failed. So I suppose there's a chance you're telling the truth about this part as well, and you really did blackmail the Hokage. In which case, what do you want from me?"

"Tell me what happened the day after we fought - fully, honestly and to the best of your ability."

"That's it?"

Naruto nodded. "Yeah. Now, since we're technically enemies, I could add a bunch of conditions about all the different ways in which you're not allowed to lie, and you could look for loopholes in them, but instead I'll just say this. What you're buying is the right to leave this life with honour. How much truth you pay with is a direct reflection of how much you think that right is worth."

Tariki gave him an incredulous look. "I really can't tell whether you've got no balls at all, or huge swinging ones of steel. You kill my brother and take me prisoner to be tortured and killed. Then you cry like a baby when I tell you the absolute basics of how life really works. Then you boast like you're the second coming of the Sage of Six Paths. Then you bargain with me and spend favours for what you could get for free through torture. And now you blackmail me with the last thing I've got left to care about."

"All right, final question. How do I know that when you've got what you want, you won't walk out of that door and forget I ever existed?"

"Who, me? The 'fucking tragic hero trying to do good in a fucked-up world'?" Naruto grinned. "The 'naive little prick who doesn't know the first thing about real life'? I guess you don't. But if you haven't figured out what kind of person I am yet..."

Tariki sighed. "I could have died instead of Jiriki, and then he'd be the one here, stuck dealing with this bullshit. But no, he always knew to get out before the shit hit the fan, everywhere from the women's baths to Hidden Mist itself. So... what do you want to know?"

-o-

Some time later, Naruto returned to the reception area to find three ninja in unfamiliar, predominantly dark grey uniforms, arguing with a cheerful Yukari.

"These documents are filled out to every last specification you gave us! Now, for the last time, you are to hand over prisoner Onigahara Tariki to us immediately for urgent transfer to Root facilities! We are _not_ going back to get these forms redone _again_!"

Yukari smiled in a friendly fashion. "Of course, sir. Let me take a look. Now, I see you've submitted them in triplicate, with the date in the top right hand corner in the correct order, signed and countersigned by the relevant authorities with name readings provided in the appropriate format..."

She continued to talk softly to herself as she carefully examined every last element of each of the three forms, taking care to do so with the speed of a sleeping sloth.

"Thank you. Now, I will be happy to take you through to the main complex to carry out your request... as soon as you correct this error here."

"What?!"

"Section 71, paragraph 4, clause 9 of the Rules and Regulations of the Assassination and Battle Tactics Special Unit clearly stipulates that forms referring to prisoners originally from the Hidden Village of Mist must list their names in both standard script and Traditional Mist characters, for reasons of compatibility with other document databases."

"But Traditional Mist characters haven't been used for generations! There probably isn't anyone outside Mist who can even read them!"

"I'm sorry for your inconvenience, sir," Yukari responded in the friendliest, most innocent tone she could muster. "Before you leave, I should remind you that any action likely to reveal Mist missing-nin Onigahara Tariki's presence in Leaf to Mist authorities, including requesting the Traditional Mist characters used in writing his name, would be deemed an act of treason if performed without the authorisation of the Hokage's office."

"This isn't over, damn you!"

"Have a nice day!"


End file.
